On Thursday morning, cryptocurrency exchange website Crypto.com announced that the company had lost well over $30 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum after hackers attacked their servers on January 17th.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70411560/acastro_bitcoin_2.0.jpg)
The total value of the unauthorized withdrawals was 4,836.26 ETH and 443.93 BTC which corresponds to roughly $15.2 million and $18.6 million. The company also says that 483 Crypto.com user accounts were compromised as the result of the theft. Fortunately, all the sufferers have been fully reimbursed for their losses.
“On Monday, 17 January 2022 at approximately 12:46 AM UTC Crypto.com’s risk monitoring systems detected unauthorized activity on a small number of user accounts where transactions were being approved without the 2FA authentication control being inputted by the user, “This triggered an immediate response from multiple teams to assess the impact. All withdrawals on the platform were suspended for the duration of the investigation. Any accounts found to be impacted were fully restored.” – says Crypto.com.
Because of the hack, the company has changed its two-factor authentication system to a new architecture, and receded all existing 2FA tokens, meaning that all customers will need to switch over to the new authentication system.
Cryptocurrency exchange websites are becoming high-value targets for hacker attacks. In 2021 there were more than 20 exchange hacks where the criminals escaped with more than $10 million, according to an analysis by NBC News, there were another six cases where the value of funds stolen exceeded $100 million.
source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/20/22892958/crypto-com-exchange-hack-bitcoin-ethereum-security
As a crypto investor myself, it’s kinda worrying and there will be more and more attacks as the market cap of crypto rises.
The crypto market is changing, we are observing many signs that are showing a lack of security. A lot of people state that we can compare the current crypto market with Wild West. Much more crypto scams such as ScuidCoin, and weak mainstream currencies DodgeCoin. For me, this change is causing less interest in this sphere of investing money.
Definitely unnerving as someone who invests crypto and uses crypto.com. It makes an investor lose confidence in crypto exchanges especially when something like this can happen to such a legitimate and reputable platform.
Scary, as far as i know another company had a problem like that. Kucoin – another centralised portal for investing in crypto. Here is an article: https://www.zdnet.com/article/kucoin-ceo-says-84-of-stolen-cryptocurrency-has-been-recovered/
They’ve recovered 84% of the stolen money. But still I feel like my money isn’t safe.