The New Zealand cryptocurrency exchange Cryptopia became a victim of hacking and is currently providing "unscheduled system maintenance". The announcement was published on January 15 on the official exchange page on Twitter.
“We apologize for the delay in publishing the information and thank you for your patience. Yesterday, January 14, 2019, there was a hack on the Cryptopia Stock Exchange, which led to significant losses. After the security breach was discovered by the staff of the exchange, unscheduled maintenance of the system began. At the same time, we began to assess the damage.”
The total amount of damage is not specified in the application. However, an ETH transaction happened 43 hours ago, because of which 19,390 ETHs were transferred from the Cryptopia wallet to an unknown address. The cost of translated esters is just over $ 2.5 million.
It is worth noting that the first official Twitter post on maintenance was made on January 13 and reads:
“Currently, we have unscheduled maintenance, we work to resume service as soon as possible. We will keep you informed".
Cryptopia became the first cryptocurrency exchange hacked in 2019. The cryptocurrency community quickly took this into account, as the popular Bitcoin Proponent, Whale Panda (@WhalePanda) stated that the exchange was very small. He also added that it was somewhat “interesting” that the attack took place during a “bearish” market, when small exchanges are trying to keep afloat, hinting that the possibility of insider work cannot be ruled out.
While the news did not affect the market, at the same time, the site team made it clear that the relevant government agencies, the New Zealand Police and the high-tech crime unit were informed and are working together to investigate this issue.
Last year there were two major attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges. From the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck in January 2018, NEM tokens worth 58 billion yen were stolen - almost $ 533 million. A month later, BitGrail cryptocurrency exchange announced the embezzlement of 17,000,000 XRB (Nano / RaiBlocks) - more than $ 160 million at the market rate at that time. As a result, the exchange went bankrupt, and recently law firms sued it on behalf of Nano investors.