New Zealand-based Cryptopia is a cryptocurrency exchange which offers over 800 pairs for trading. Earlier today, the exchange broke the news that there has been a major security breach, following which it went offline. This security breach happened on the 14th of January - and the exchange has suffered ‘significant losses’. As of this writing, there have been no details as to what amount has been lost as a result of this hack.
The Cryptopia cryptocurrency exchange has posted a message on Twitter, announcing this breach of security. The message reads that the hack was identified by one of their staff members - and the website has since been put on ‘maintenance mode.’ The exchange also informed the users that official authorities have been alerted about this hack, including the New Zealand Police and the High Tech Crimes Unit, which will be jointly investigating the hack. The message on Cryptopia’s tweet further reads:
“Until this has been carried out, The Cryptopia Exchange will remain in maintenance mode, with trading suspended. We are committed to getting this resolved as quickly as possible and will keep you all updated every step of the way.”
The Cryptopia website as well as Blog have both gone offline - and have only one message which shows on all their pages, which reads: Cryptopia is currently in unscheduled maintenance mode. We will be back soon.” The exchange had been down since 06:55 UTC on January 14th, while this announcement was made at 08:00 UTC on the 15th of January, over 24 hours later. Interestingly, this is not even the first time that Cryptopia has faced an attack. In November 2014, the exchange reportedly suffered a loss of $500,000 due to a 51% attack carried out on AurumCoin.
Reports from Whale Alert point out that Ethereum (19,391 ETH) worth $2.44 Million and Centrality (48 Million CENNZ) tokens worth $1.18 Million were transferred from Cryptopia to unknown wallet addresses. As of this writing, it is not clear if this transaction is that of the hackers or Cryptopia moving funds to a secure wallet.
CNBC’s Ran NeuNer also commented on Cryptopia’s hack via a Tweet, saying:
"I’m interested to see how the Cryptopia hack plays out, how much was lost & whether they were negligent in storage. Will they be able to refund users given their size & the state of the market. I suspect many smaller exchanges won’t survive this and the bigger ones will benefit! "
Over the past one year, a large number of cryptocurrency exchanges have fallen prey to hacks. This lack of safety is yet another reason which has caused a decline in public interest towards cryptocurrencies. Over the past one year, we witnessed the biggest cryptocurrency hack of all times - where cryptocurrencies worth $530 Million were stolen following the Coincheck cryptocurrency exchange got hacked.
Other major hacks of the past year include the Bitgrail exchange being hacked, various (failed) attacks on Binance, the Zaif cryptocurrency exchange being hacked, the Electrum Wallet being hacked, etc. Cryptopia has become the latest name on the list of these hacked cryptocurrency exchanges.
Stay tuned with us at Cryptoground for more updates from the world of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology.