Incident All ledgers
Upbit: $49.3m
Upbit lost $49.3m on 27 November 2019. Ranked 74th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 27 November 2019
- Lost
- $49.3m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- CEX
- Category
- Key Compromise
- Method
- Hot Wallet Key Compromised
- Chains
- Ethereum
On November 27, 2019, attackers drained 342,000 ETH (about $49.3M) from South Korean exchange Upbit's Ethereum hot wallet. Upbit halted deposits and withdrawals, moved remaining funds to cold storage, and covered losses itself; authorities later attributed it to Lazarus/Andariel.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 74th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 1st in 2019.
- It accounts for 99.0% of the $49.8m in known losses in November 2019.
- 153 incidents in the ledger are classified as Key Compromise, for $8.96bn in total. This one is 0.6% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Other incidents named Upbit
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26 Nov 2025 | Upbit | $36.0m | CEX | Malware | — |
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 Sept 2023 | CoinEx | $55.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 22 Jun 2024 | BtcTurk | $54.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 24 Feb 2025 | Infini | $49.5m | DeFi Protocol | Private Key Compromised | — |
| 14 Aug 2025 | BtcTurk | $48.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 19 Jul 2025 | CoinDCX | $44.2m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
All failures in 2019 · The failures ledger
Amounts are DefiLlama’s estimates and can change as incidents are revalued. Its returned figure can include money a company repaid itself, not only funds recovered from attackers. Source: DefiLlama.
Cite this Bitminer.io, “Upbit, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/upbit-2019-11-27/. How this is built