4 CommentsOne of the largest European Bitcoin companies, the Danish platform BIPS, was attacked last Friday (22). The heist yielded 1,295 BTC to the hackers, the equivalent to more than a $1 million according to this Tuesday’s (26) exchange rate.
The suspects broke into BIPS’s servers and emptied the content of 22,000 wallets belonging to the platform’s clients, The Hacker News reports. The exchange and payment processor, which also had a wallet service until now, is now informing all the affected Bitcoiners.
“To protect the successful merchant processing business, BIPS has decided to temporarily close down its consumer wallet initiative”, the company announced on its website. “BIPS has been a target of a coordinated attack and subsequent security breached. Several consumer wallets have been compromised and BIPS will be contacting the affected users”, the message adds.
Apparently, the hack had different stages. The first happened on November 15th, when the hackers launched a a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the platform. The action had its origins in Russia and other former URSS countries, located in the same European area.
After this episode, another DDoS was launched two days later. However, this time the hackers got access to thousands of Bitcoin wallets, being able to later steal the 1,295 BTC.
As a consequence BIPS will temporarily close down the wallet initiative to focus on real-time merchant processing business which does not include storing of Bitcoins. Subsequently BIPS will consider to reintroduce the wallet initiative with a re-architected security model.
The consumer wallet initiative has not been BIPS core business and as such regrettably affecting several users has not affected BIPS merchant acquiring.
According to BIPS, all existing users will now be asked to transfer their Bitcoins to other wallet solutions and users affected by the security breach will be contacted.
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