What happened
AscendEX reported unauthorized transfers from a hot wallet on 11 December 2021 across Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. The exchange said cold wallets were unaffected and promised full reimbursement.
Technical root cause
AscendEX’s incident report attributes the breach to an exploit of a hardware-level vulnerability in third-party infrastructure. It does not identify the vendor weakness or a more detailed exploit sequence.
How it happened
- Monitoring detected abnormal transfers from the exchange’s hot-wallet infrastructure.
- The attacker moved assets across several supported networks.
- AscendEX replaced its hot-wallet infrastructure and resumed withdrawals after investigation.
Protocol details
Classification
Infrastructure / CeFi / Key Compromise
Protocol Type
Exploit/Access control
Protocol links
Website
@AscendEX_Global
Evidence
- report Post-mortem rekt.news
- report Dec. 11 Security Incident Report ascendex.com
- analysis Website reference archive.is
- analysis Website reference archive.is
- analysis DeFiLlama defillama.com
- analysis AscendEX Twitter Spaces AMA ascendex.com
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