01-27-2018 , 03:24 PM
Quote:Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck confirmed that some $524 million worth of digital coins had been stolen—likely making it the largest single hack on an exchange, even outweighing the Mt. Gox breach of 2014.Source: http://fortune.com/2018/01/26/bitcoin-pr...em-mt-gox/
That’s according to Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, which reports that Coincheck said that some 500 million units of a cryptocurrency known as NEM, worth about 58 billion yen, had been taken from customers’ wallets.
The stake has now fallen to about $430 million, with spooked investors selling off their holdings following rumors of the hack earlier Friday.
Coincheck is reportedly still trying to determine the nature of the attack, but noted that other cryptocurrencies were not impacted. Some critics point to Coincheck’s lack of multi-sig wallets, in which multiple keys are needed to authorize a transaction, as part of the vulnerabilities that facilitated the hack.
The most recent hack outranks a major trauma for early cryptocurrency investors in terms of U.S. dollar. In 2014, the largest exchange at the time, Mt. Gox, revealed that some 850,000 Bitcoin, valued at $470 million, had been stolen. The value of the stake later dropped to about $400 million in the hours following the revelation.