South Korean Blockchain Music Platform Somesing Hacked for Millions of Dollars, PentaShield Predicts Hackers to Succeed in 2023 with a Staggering 2 Billion KRW
The Block report: South Korean blockchain-based karaoke platform Somesing was hacked on Saturday, resulting in a loss of over 700 million SSX tokens, worth approximately $11.5 million. The team stated that the incident was unrelated to internal members and has reported it to the Korean authorities and the police.
What is Somesing?
Somesing is a music singing content platform based on the Klaytn blockchain ($KLAY), aiming to connect users who love music through their “Singverse” on the platform.
As a Web3 community music service, Somesing allows singers or performers to pay fees to upload their own original songs or covers to the platform. It encourages users to donate tokens to creators, giving them a certain proportion of the native token SSX as a reward.
Somesing Official Introduction:
It is reported that up to 60% of the token supply will be used to incentivize creators, 20% will belong to the platform, and the rest will be used for copyright fees and community maintenance.
Klaytn is created by the South Korean technology company KAKAO in Singapore, which is also one of the founders of the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Upbit.
Previous announcements from Somesing showed that in a hacker attack on January 27, the platform lost 730 million SSX tokens, resulting in a loss of up to $11.5 million. The losses include 504 million undistributed SSX tokens and 226 million SSX tokens held by the Somesing Foundation. The former is expected to be released for liquidity by the end of 2025, while the latter is already in circulation.
The statement also stated:
According to the investigation so far, it has been confirmed that the hacker incident is unrelated to any internal members of the SOMESING team. We speculate that this incident was carried out by professional hackers specializing in cryptocurrency hacking activities.
It also added, “SOMESING has reported the case to the Cyber Investigation Division of the Korean National Police Agency and requested an investigation into the incident, and will report it to the International Criminal Police Organization.”
To prevent possible drastic price fluctuations, the team has urgently requested domestic and foreign cryptocurrency exchanges that list SSX-related trading pairs to suspend deposits and withdrawals.
Currently, exchanges including Upbit, Bithumb, and Coinone have suspended deposits and withdrawals of the token in the past few days. On the other hand, exchanges with SSX trading pairs, HTX and Gate.io, have not released any related announcements.
The team also stated that they are working with the Klaytn Foundation to track the chain’s records, identify the destination of the funds, and identify the attackers. They claimed to freeze their assets and take legal action.
Cybersecurity team PeckShield also summarized the statistics of hacker incidents in 2023, stating that there were over 600 major hacker attacks in the cryptocurrency field last year, resulting in approximately $2.61 billion in losses. Of which, $675 million has been recovered, a decrease of 22.78% compared to 2022.
Categorized by reasons, losses caused by hacker attacks or vulnerability exploits amounted to approximately $1.51 billion (excluding the Multichain incident), while losses due to fraud amounted to $1.1 billion.
It is worth mentioning that DeFi protocols are still more susceptible to attacks compared to CeFi, accounting for up to 67% of the attack incidents.
As for 2024, the total amount of losses from hacker incidents in the first month has already exceeded $100 million, indicating significant losses.
(PeckShield, Somesing, The Block, fraud, South Korea, hacker)
