$72 million Bitcoin theft from Bitfinex exchange causes cryptocurrency price plunge
The theft of 119,756 Bitcoin from the Bitfinex exchange has seen the price of the cryptocurrency plummet by 23 percent. In what has been described as the second biggest Bitcoin theft after MtGox, $72 million worth of Bitcoins vanished from user's accounts.
It seems that Bitfinex suffered a massive security breach when it was hit by hackers who started to filter money out of segregated wallets. Despite the hack, the exchange says that this incident doesn’t "expose any weaknesses in the security of a blockchain".
The attack on Bitfinex is particularly significant, as it is the largest dollar exchange in operation and has a large user base. Following the discovery of the breach, Bitfinex suspended trading, and by this morning Bitcoin's price had crept up again by one percent.
A post on the exchange's website explained a little about what had happened and what is being done:
Today we discovered a security breach that requires us to halt all trading on Bitfinex, as well as halt all digital token deposits to and withdrawals from Bitfinex.
We are investigating the breach to determine what happened, but we know that some of our users have had their bitcoins stolen. We are undertaking a review to determine which users have been affected by the breach. While we conduct this initial investigation and secure our environment, bitfinex.com will be taken down and the maintenance page will be left up.
The theft is being reported to -- and we are co-operating with -- law enforcement.
As we account for individualized customer losses, we may need to settle open margin positions, associated financing, and/or collateral affected by the breach. Any settlements will be at the current market prices as of 18:00 UTC. We are taking this necessary accounting step to normalize account balances with the objective of resuming operations. We will look at various options to address customer losses later in the investigation. While we are halting all operations at this time, we can confirm that the breach was limited to bitcoin wallets; the other digital tokens traded on Bitfinex are unaffected.
As yet, it is unclear exactly what has happened or quite what the fallout will be. More details will emerge over the coming days and weeks.
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