Genesis
Starting Sunday 13th January 2019 at around 8:30 am, ether started to leak off Cryptopia’s ETH hot wallet followed by tokens from other wallets. Around the same day, funds continued to leak off other 76,000+ secondary wallets. The next day, Monday 14th, Cryptopia froze trading indefinitely claiming they were performing unscheduled maintenance. The next day, Tuesday 15th, Cryptopia disclosed that they had experienced a security breach and that the New Zealand Police had started investigation.
A week after the breach, World’s blockchain index explorer, Elementus that performs blockchain queries released a detailed report here:(elementus on the cryptopia hack ) on these events claiming that over $16M of ETH and ERC-20 tokens had been stolen by the hackers.
It remains unclear whether any other altcoins besides the ERC-20 tokens were involved as Cryptopia has not release any report and chosen silence as its safe haven from the ranting customers.
Hacked again!!
2 weeks later on the Tuesday 29th, funds were again drained from Cryptopia despite the ongoing police investigation. The funds were moved to an unknown wallet and someone could have imagine that the exchange was taking caution by moving some of its funds to a secure cold wallet or something, but it turns out that some of the funds over, 1,675.96 Ether were moved to one of the wallets that previously drained cryptopia’s wallets. This happened at exactly 2:50:19 am Tuesday 29th.
This reveals Cryptopia’s continued vulnerability and it turns out that they could have actually lost control over their private keys meaning that the hackers could have gained access to the Cryptopia servers, copied all the keys and wiped them off the servers. Whatt!!!!!???. It still remains unclear how the hackers gained access to these private keys, but what’s for sure is, they aren’t scared of nor bothered by the ongoing investigations.
I now appreciate blockchain better.
Yes I do!. Binance announced that it would freeze any funds traced back from the hacker wallets. Elementus has also offered that if any exchange wills to follow suite and freeze these funds, they are willing to offer an analytical hand free of charge under the transparency solidarity. I have always struggled to clearly understand the whole transparency hype around blockchain and this provided me an opportunity to learn more. I now understand that blockchain is the irrevocable proof and whatever happens on the blockchain remains forever and can be traced as of when it’s willed. This makes it possible for audit to take place without worrying about transparency. The transactions are immutable and each coin can be traced way from the time it was mined to which wallet it currently resides.
How much have I lost???
What remains worrying here is that Cryptopia hasn’t let out an official communication; not even via email (at least not for me). I opened my first account with Cryptopia early last year and I traded coins like Bitcoin Green, Electroneum, Everus, TPAY, DAPPS etc and at the time of the hack, I owned only Bitcoin Green at the exchange. I can’t wait to be lucky but it still remains worrying what the next steps will be for Cryptopia. Figures and toes are crossed!!.
More and detailed info can be accessed at the Elementus website:
cryptopia-hacker-strikes-again-15-days-later
