Incident Overview
On June 22, 2024, BtcTurk, one of Turkey’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, suffered a security breach affecting the hot wallets of 10 different cryptocurrencies, though its cold wallets remained safe. As a result, deposits and withdrawals on the platform were suspended. Binance has since frozen over $5.3 million in stolen funds and is assisting with ongoing investigations.
Additionally, $54 million worth of AVAX linked to the attack was observed being sold, further fueling speculation about the extent of the breach.
The attack targeted hot wallets, which typically hold smaller, active reserves for immediate transactions, rather than cold wallets that store the majority of funds offline. On the same day, $54 million in AVAX was traced to an address believed to belong to a Turkish exchange, strengthening suspicions that AVAX was part of the stolen assets. Binance’s security team, collaborating with BtcTurk, managed to freeze over $5.3 million of the stolen assets, showing the importance of exchange-level cooperation in incident response.
Investigations are ongoing, with more updates expected as new findings emerge.
Incident Report
Protocol Information
Market Context at Time of Hack
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 BtcTurk, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (June 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Private Key Compromised (Unknown Method) / 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 BtcTurk
The BtcTurk 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.