Gatecoin, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange, admits the loss of bitcoins and ethers for a total of more than $2 million. The exchange’s hot wallets suffered hacker attacks for three consecutive days.
According to Gatecoin, about 1.85 million ether tokens and 250 bitcoins were stolen, which equals to $2.14 million at the current exchange rate and about 15% of all cryptocurrency funds stored on Gatecoin accounts.
The exchange confirmed that the first cyberattack was registered on 9 May and lasted for three days in a row.
As a result of the assault, on 13 May the exchange had to suspend operations. Then, CEO of Gatecoin Aurelien Menant claimed that tokens of the DigixDAO, Augur and TheDAO projects were not affected. Gatecoin also assured that those customers who had suffered any loss of funds in the attacks would be reimbursed in full.
Currently, Gatecoin conducts an internal investigation of the incident. The exchange noticed in a statement that the hackers targeted cryptocurrency funds in its offline storage.
“We have previously communicated the fact that most clients’ crypto-asset funds are stored in multi-signature cold wallets. However, the malicious external party involved in this breach managed to alter our system so that ETH deposit transfers by-passed the multi-sig cold storage and went directly to the hot wallet during the breach period. This means that losses of ETH funds exceed the 5% limit that we imposed on our hot wallets”.
Gatecoin announced the launch of a special platform to let customers withdraw remaining funds in all fiat and cryptographic currencies (except bitcoins and ethers). The platform will be opened on 28 May. However, the date when withdrawals of bitcoins and ethers will be available is still unconfirmed.
“The Gatecoin team is currently working on raising additional funding to cover the losses of BTC and ETH and hopes to be able to reimburse all customers that have experienced losses as soon as possible”, the exchange official statement reads.
In the recent months, there have been a few large-scale hacker attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide. In April, it was revealed that the exchange ShapeShift lost $230,000 as a result of a series of cyberattacks. Later, a Canadian exchange Cointrader was forced to close down due to the loss of a significant part of funds to hackers.
Elena Platonova
