Indian exchange Bitbns admits it was hacked for $7.5M last February

Crypto sleuth who goes by ZachXBT on Twitter, claimed that Indian crypto exchange Bitbns covered up a hack under the guise of “system maintenance” on Feb. 1, 2022. ZachXBT shared a screenshot of the maintenance tweet put up by BitBNS during which time the exchange was hacked, he claimed on March 1, 2023.

Bitbns CEO  Gaurav Dahake admitted in an AMA session today that the exchange was indeed hacked 13 months ago. But Dahake claimed that the system was taken offline to analyze anomalies and was not a tact to hide the hack.

Dahake said that Bitbns took the exchange offline when the team noticed surprisingly high throughput on their servers. The team then discovered that the price of Polygon (MATIC), BNB (BNB), and Aave (AAVE) was incorrect and there was a difference in buying and selling price of the tokens. The team also noticed some anomalies in withdrawals, he said.

During this investigation, the team noticed that a certain address had received different tokens from the platform, alerting them of the hack. These stolen assets were then converted to Ethereum (ETH) and sent to different addresses.

While Dahake did not confirm the number of assets stolen in the attack, ZachXBT claimed the assets were worth $7.5 million.

Dahake mainly brushed off the hack as something that’s “not abnormal” in the crypto space since most major exchanges including Binance have been compromised at certain times. He said that exchanges improve their security systems after such incidents and Bitbns has been functioning “seamlessly” in the 13 months following the attack.