South Korean cryptocurrency exchange GOPAX suspended digital-asset deposits, standard withdrawals and trading on Friday, after receiving a hacking-threat email, while retaining a manual withdrawal-request process through customer support.
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GOPAX said it was transferring most assets held in internet-connected hot wallets into offline cold storage as a precaution and reported no asset losses.
Manual Withdrawals Remain Available
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Customers seeking withdrawals must apply through support, with requests processed manually and sequentially after internal verification and approval. The exchange warned processing could take longer than usual, and no service-resumption timetable had been set in the November 6 reports.
GOPAX had previously disclosed information exposure affecting seven customers and two current or former employees on October 16, after abnormal account access began in early September and was detected in early October.
Regulator Reports Sector-Wide Breaches
The suspension follows a series of security incidents across South Korea’s financial sector.
The country’s Financial Services Commission reported 40 incidents at 37 companies between September 30 and November 3, involving approximately 473,000 personal-information records. Reported theft totaled about KRW1 billion, approximately US$745,000, mostly from company management accounts, while individual users had not been found to have lost funds.
Bithumb, one of South Korea’s largest crypto exchanges, was among the affected firms, with an intrusion into its internal employee-support system prompting an FSC emergency meeting on October 28 and subsequent reports confirming customer-data exposure.
The regulator has since announced inspections covering about 580 financial companies and instructed firms to suspend affected operations where vulnerabilities are identified.
The surge in data breaches and cyberattacks targeting financial institutions extends far past South Korea, highlighted by the theft of $6.3 billion in cryptocurrency from the Binance exchange, an attack attributed to North Korean hackers.
