Bitcoin suffered a drop in price, along with several other virtual currencies following the disclosures that South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail was hacked at the weekend.
Bitcoin’s price dropped by over £350 in the space of an hour following the announcement of the hack by Coinrail in a tweet.
해킹공격시도로 인한 시스템 점검중입니다. 일부코인(펀디엑스,NPXS)이 확인되었으며 추가적인 코인피해가 있는지 여부를 확인중입니다. 추후 자세한 사항은 재공지하겠습니다 / There has been an cyber intrusion in our system. We're confirming it and some coins(Pundi X, NPXS) are confirmed.
— coinrail (@Coinrail_Korea) June 10, 2018
Coinrail later confirmed in a statement on its site that it had lost 30 percent of the coins traded on the exchange. Local news site Yonhap estimates the loss to be over £27 million.
Coinrail have said they have managed to freeze two-thirds of the coins suspected to be leaked and have stated in their release that: “All assets of Coinrails that have not been frozen are transferred to a cold wallet and are kept safe.’’
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However, the rest of the stolen coins need to be looked at with Coinrail commenting: ‘’we are looking into it with an investigative agency, related exchanges and coin developers.’’
Coinrail have only released the names of a few of the tokens affected in the hack, names include ATC from Aston, NPXS token from the Pundi X project and NPER project tokens.
In a blog post, Pundi X stated that: ‘’Since the amount of NPXS token is equal to 3% of our current supply, which could potentially affect the interests of all parties, we instigated an emergency security protocol to halt ALL the NPXS transactions at 11:16 am Singapore time.’’ (Sunday)
Within the post, Pundi X states that they have revived communication from the Korean National Police Agency who is now working with Coinrail to arrest the hacker.
They published the police corresponded from the Police which said they should: ‘’Hold onto the tokens that were hacked from the Coinrail accounts in order to protect NPXS Korean holders’ assets.’’
This is just another event in a series of cyber-security vulnerabilities linked to cryptocurrency exchanges.
Last January, Tokyo based virtual currency exchange Coincheck was involved in a cybersecurity event which saw hackers walk away with nearly £400 million pounds in cryptocurrency. The hack saw the Japanese authorities raid Coinchecks offices in the weeks that followed.
Coincheck has begun to reimburse its customers, but is facing two class-action lawsuits as a result of the fallout from the hack.
