Bitfinex bitcoin-exchange hacked and brought about $ 65 million in equivalent

The rate of cryptocurrency after that fell by 18%

Yesterday it became known about the hacking of Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange, headquartered in Hong Kong. The crackers managed to withdraw 119,756 units of cryptocurrency, which at the time of the hack was $ 65 million. Bitfinex is a popular cryptocurrency exchange, the third largest in the world in terms of operations.

Immediately after it became known about the incident, the rate of cryptocurrency fell by 5.5%. In two days, the exchange rate fell by about 18%, which led to a decrease in the capitalization of the Bitcoin market by about $ 1.5 billion.

Now all operations on the stock exchange are terminated. Neither withdraw nor introduce funds can be. Bitfinex employees conduct a thorough analysis of the incident, and law enforcement officers are involved in the investigation. On the website of the exchange posted a message about hacking, which states the following: “We are studying the problem in order to determine exactly what happened. We know that some of our users' bitcoins have been stolen. We check which of the users suffered as a result of hacking. During the investigation, all operations are terminated, a page with a warning about ongoing technical work has been launched at the address of the exchange. ” The company is exploring various possibilities of restoring balance to the wallets of users whose funds have been stolen by intruders.
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Bitfinex conducted operations not only with Bitcoins, but also with other cryptocurrencies, for example, Ethereum. And although the hack affected only bitcoin, the exchange temporarily stopped carrying out all operations with all cryptocurrencies.


Current course

New - well forgotten old

The current situation is reminiscent of events two years ago, when the Mt. Gox, at that time the largest in the world, announced a burglary. A few weeks later the company declared itself bankrupt . Hacking Mt. Gox was implemented in February 2014, and at the same time the cryptocurrency rate fell by 30%. According to the management of the exchange, a total of $ 450 million was stolen from the wallets. Later, the company “discovered” $ 100 million (in equivalent) on one of the wallets, but everything else was lost forever.

Mark Karpelès, ex-head of the Mt.Gox bitcoin exchange, was arrested in Japan in August 2015. He was accused of stealing $ 1 million using certain manipulations with the algorithms of Mt.Gox.

Last year, Bitfinex entered into a partnership agreement with BitGo, a company that developed a solution that allows users to more quickly go through the identification and withdrawal process. Most exchanges, including OKCoin, leave only a small portion of assets active (available for instant transactions). Everything else is stored in the passive mode and is not available for such operations.

“Since now we use two-factor authentication (Bitfinex is the first step of authorization and BitGo is the second), attackers needed to compromise both systems before accessing assets,” representatives of the exchange said.

Employees of BitGo have already stated that they have studied the situation on their side, and no traces of hacking have been found. “At the moment there is no reason to believe that some of the BitGo servers or services have been compromised,” said company spokesman Joe Volat. "We believe that the technology on the basis of which all our systems operate is not compromised."

In turn, representatives of Bitfinex announced a thorough investigation and asked the community for patience while analyzing the incident and eliminating the consequences of hacking.