Cryptocurrencies are no doubt considered the innovation of the decade because of its decentralized nature. In the beginning they were a means to bypass the need of various centralized institutions to safeguard your assets but lately they have moved on to being so much more. Bitcoin, which was worth merely a few cents has now risen to thousands of dollars, the highest being close to $20,000 in the end of 2017. Since then the cryptoworld has been bearish and the value has seen some serious ups and downs. Nevertheless, the asset holds value and is highly volatile. It has also garnered the attention of many potential investors as well as scammer and looters, not to mention nefarious hackers, out to rob the digital assets.
Recently, a Cryptocurrency exchange situated in New Zealand took to twitter to announce that their website had been compromised due to a malicious attack. According to the tweet, apparently, there had been a security breach on 14th Jan, 2019, which had been the cause of major losses. Right after the breach the authorities took notice and put the exchange under maintenance to assess the extent of the damages that been caused.
The website of the exchange appears to be offline with a message being displayed that says “Cryptopia is currently in unscheduled maintenance mode. We will be back soon.”
The information as to who has been responsible for the malicious attack, yet remains uncovered along with the details of how much damages the exchange has endured. The post did mention, that the incumbent governmental authorities have been notified of the attack, in this case the authorities being New Zealand Police and High Tech Crime Units, who have been carrying out investigation in order to apprehend the responsible entities and are helping out the exchange by advising them on how to proceed.
Cryptopia has yet to inform its users about when the exchange will be online again, as of yet they appear to be in maintenance mode and have informed that the services will be active once the matters at hand are resolved. They further stated,
Until this has been carried out, The Cryptopia Exchange will remain in maintenance mode, with trading suspended. We are committed to getting this resolved as quickly as possible and will keep you all updated every step of the way.
Although there has been no account of how much users have endured losses, but according to the tweets made by Whale Alert, it was observed that a total of 19,391 ETH equivalent to $2,438,152 were transferred from Cryptopia Exchange to unknown wallets along with 48,029,306 CENNZ equivalent to $1,176,596. However, the question whether these transfers were made by the hackers or not yet remains unanswered.
19,391 #ETH (2,438,152 USD) transferred from #Cryptopia to Unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) January 13, 2019
Taking into account the recent events that have transpired in the wake of last few years, the attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges and other malware content has been increasing. The nascent technology, crypto, needs to evolve to better security protocols must be set in place to avoid this kind of malicious intrusions in the future.
