An worker of CoinDCX, a cryptocurrency alternate that was hacked for $44 million in mid-July, was arrested in India in reference to a safety breach, in line with a number of native reviews.
Bengaluru Metropolis police detained CoinDCX software program engineer Rahul Agarwal after hackers allegedly managed to compromise his login credentials to siphon the alternate’s belongings, The Occasions of India reported on Thursday.
The arrest adopted a criticism and inside investigation by CoinDCX operator Neblio Applied sciences, which decided that Agarwal’s credentials had been compromised through his work laptop computer, permitting unauthorized entry to the corporate’s servers.
Throughout questioning as his laptop computer was seized, Agarwal, 30, denied involvement within the crypto theft, however admitted to taking up part-time work for as much as 4 personal purchasers whereas nonetheless employed at CoinDCX.
“Refined social engineering assault”
CoinDCX declined to substantiate or deny Agarwal’s arrest to Cointelegraph, referring to an X publish by CoinDCX co-founder and CEO Sumit Gupta, who advised the general public on Thursday that the alternate can not have interaction with media amid an ongoing investigation.
“Primarily based on our inside preliminary findings, this seems to be a complicated social engineering assault,” Gupta mentioned within the publish, including that staff are sometimes focused in such assaults.
“We urge the media and the general public to keep away from hypothesis or the circulation of unverified data, as it might impede the continuing investigation,” a spokesperson for CoinDCX advised Cointelegraph.
Agarwal’s skilled background
Citing Neblio’s vp for public coverage, Hardeep Singh, Bengaluru police reportedly mentioned that the arrested worker was a everlasting workers member and had been issued a laptop computer strictly for his position at CoinDCX, in line with The Occasions of India.
Agarwal got here below investigation after Neblio found that an unknown particular person had hacked the system through the evening on July 19 and transferred 1 USDt (USDT) stablecoin to a pockets. Later that morning, hackers siphoned $44 million and transferred the funds to 6 wallets.
In response to a LinkedIn profile presupposed to be Agarwal’s, the arrested CoinDCX worker had been with CoinDCX for over two years, constructing his profession within the DevOps area.
He started as a senior software program engineer in Could 2023, working remotely from Bengaluru, Karnataka. After two years on this position, he was promoted to workers engineer in April 2025, a place he at the moment holds and performs on-site.
Associated: CoinDCX denies it’s in talks to be acquired by Coinbase
In response to The Indian Categorical, the law enforcement officials mentioned hackers tricked Agarwal into putting in malware on his workplace laptop computer.
The information got here days after CoinDCX CEO Gupta reported that the alternate was hacked on July 19.
He mentioned no consumer funds have been affected by the exploit, including that the hackers compromised one among CoinDCX’s inside accounts used for “liquidity provisions” with one other alternate by way of a server breach.
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