Incident Overview
On May 8, 2025, Taiwanese crypto exchange BitoPro was likely exploited for approximately $11.5 million following unauthorized access to one of its hot wallets during a wallet system upgrade. The stolen funds were quickly laundered through decentralized exchanges and privacy tools such as Tornado Cash, Thorchain, and Wasabi Wallet. Initially, BitoPro did not publicly disclose the breach, citing "system maintenance" as the reason for service disruption.
After blockchain sleuth ZachXBT exposed the exploit, BitoPro confirmed the incident.
The attacker compromised BitoPro’s hot wallet infrastructure during a scheduled upgrade and asset transfer operation. The breach allowed the attacker to withdraw assets across multiple chains, including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and Tron. The attacker then converted these assets to more anonymous forms, leveraging decentralized exchanges and mixing protocols to obfuscate their trail.
BitoPro later admitted that the hot wallet involved was outdated and targeted during maintenance. Despite the breach, the exchange claimed to have sufficient reserves and assured users that withdrawals, deposits, and trading remained unaffected. The exchange’s transparency came only after outside scrutiny, highlighting gaps in disclosure and incident response.
Incident Report
Protocol Information
What the Attacker Needed to Succeed
Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.
What Auditors Should Check
If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to BitoPro BitoGroup, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (May 2025).
- Verify all logic paths related to Access Control are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Access Control Attacks attack class for patterns
- Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs
Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.
Free TrialRelated Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
Learn to Prevent the Next BitoPro BitoGroup
The BitoPro BitoGroup hack is one of many attacks that skilled auditors are trained to detect before deployment. Master real exploit patterns and defense techniques with hands-on Web3 security training.