INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Another day, another crypto hack
This time it Korea, the crypto-mad Asian country, where an exchange called Coinrail lost more than $40 million in altcoins, ICO-issued
tokens that aren''t bitcoin or Ethereum, after it was hit by an apparent attack over the weekend.
Korea may be a hot spot for crypto
investment, but Coinrail is one of its smaller exchanges, just about ranking inside the world top 90 based on trading volume, according to
Nonetheless, even the smaller exchanges have plenty of coins, as the size of this heist illustrates.
Most notably, the hackers got away with
$19.5 million-worth of NPXS tokens that were issued by payment project Pundi X ICO
Added to that they scored a further $13.8 million from Aston X, an ICO project building a platform to decentralize documents, $5.8 million
in tokens for Dent, a mobile data ICO, and over $1.1 million Tron, a much-hyped project originating from China.
That according to a wallet
address that has been identified as belonging to the alleged attacker, who also got hold of smaller volumes of a further five tokens from
Coinrail.
In all the cases, the companies issuing the tokens themselves were not hacked, the tokens that were nabbed belong to Coinrail
users.
#54644;킹공격시도로 인한 시스템
점검중입니다
일부코인(펀디엑스,NPXS)이 확인되었으며
추가적인 코인피해가 있는지 여부를
확인중입니다
추후 자세한 사항은 재공지하겠습니다 / There
has been an cyber intrusion in our system
We're confirming it and some coins(Pundi X, NPXS) are confirmed.
mdash; coinrail (@Coinrail_Korea) June 10, 2018
It isn''t clear how, or
indeed whether, Coinrail will go about compensating its customers — Japan Coincheck refunded its customers following a high-profile attack
earlier this year — but some of the ICO projects are taking steps in response.
Pundi was hit the hardest, claiming that some three percent
of its total volume of tokens was impacted by this attack
Itsaid it has frozen the tokens that were stolen and it has ceased trading of its tokens across all exchanges to help with the post-attack
investigation, which it said includes the Korean police
NPER, which had around $860,000-worth of tokens taken from Coinrail, said it had frozen the stolen funds and it plans incinerate the tokens
to render them useless to the hacker
Aston has also frozen its affected tokens, according to Coinrail.
Other projects have yet to comment, although Coinrail said in a statement
on its website that two-thirds of the stolen tokens have been frozen with more action likely to happen.
Coinrail took its service offline
and it said in a statement that it hasmoved the remainder of its assets — which it said is 70 percent of its total holdings —to cold
storage while it reviews its security system and fully investigates the incident.
Some have suggested that the hack was responsible for
bitcoin valuation dropping by over five percent in what is the cryptocurrency biggest decline for two weeks
However, Coinrail is so obscure that this theory seems unlikely.
What is for certain is that the hackserves as another strong reminder that
the space remains unregulated — there with little recourse for victims of a crypto exchange hack, unlike say a bank robbery or payment
More importantly, those who do buy bitcoin, Ethereum or other crypto tokens should keep their tokens securely in a private wallet (ideally
using a hardware device for access) rather than leaving them within an exchange where they could be stolen.
For those of you keeping score
on recent hacks on exchanges, here are a few: Coincheck lost an estimated $400 million earlier this year, last November sawTether claim it
lose $31 million followingan attackwhileEtherDelta suspended its exchange service for a period in December after it was compromised.
The Mt
Gox hacking in 2014 is the mother of all crypto attacks, of course
In total the exchange lost around744,408 BTC
That was worth around $350 million at the time, but today a holding of that size would be valued at some $5.3 billion.
Note: The author owns
a small amount of cryptocurrency
Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.
