Judging by the seemingly unstoppable rise in the cost of bitcoin, it would appear no one even noticed that $70 million worth of the digital currency was stolen by hackers. The victim was the crypto-currency mining operation known as NiceHash. Steven Russolillo reports:
Andrej P. Škraba, head of marketing at NiceHash, said to The Wall Street Journal that approximately 4,700 bitcoin had been stolen from a bitcoin wallet, an online account that stores the digital currency. Bitcoin wallets, like other online bank accounts, have been targets of hackers in the past.
“It was a professional attack,” Mr. Škraba said. He declined to elaborate further, saying more information will be revealed at a later date.
In a six-minute video posted on Facebook, Marko Kobal, chief executive and co-founder of NiceHash, said either a hacker or group of hackers started infiltrating its internal systems through a compromised company computer on Tuesday at 6:18 p.m. Eastern Time. Within two hours, funds were stolen from accounts, he said.
NiceHash has notified major exchanges and mining pools about the breach “to help us track and possibly even recover the stolen funds,” Mr. Kobal said.
“We are doing really everything we can right now. However, this will take time,” he said. “As soon as we have a solution in place, we’ll reach out, hopefully in the next few days.”
The hack came as the price of bitcoin surged yet again to new highs. Through Thursday morning in New York, the digital currency soared 40% in about 40 hours, hurdling through five separate $1,000 barriers. It recently traded near its all-time high, at about $16,600, according to research site CoinDesk. At current levels, those stolen bitcoin would be worth about $78 million.
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Originally posted at Yoursurvivalguy.com.
