Exchanges Under Attack

BTER

The Bitcoin community barely had time to react to the attack before another manifested. The BTER exchange was hacked on February 12 and lost 7170 BTC, about $1.74 Million worth at the time of writing. Very little information of the hack is provided on the BTER website, other than the offer of a 720 BTC Bounty for the recovery of the funds. BTER previously lost approximately $1.65 Million in NXT, during 2014.

EXCO.IN

The exco.in exchange lost all the Bitcoin in its possession over the course of two attacks, taking place on February 6th and 10th;

“We have located the real identity of the user ‘ambiorx’ who made the fraudulent BTC, NBT and NSR withdrawals and we will be pursuing legal action. We are preparing to hand over our logs, database and other information to the authorities.”
— – Samantha Chen, Excoin Lead Developer

The method by which ‘Ambiorx’ obtained access to the Bitcoin is not set in stone, exco.in had this statement on its site, "Upon initial investigation it appears that during the [attack] two separate trades spiraled out of control either due to a bug or an exploit and transferred a very large number of small Bitcoin transactions to Ambriorx’s account."

CRYPTORUSH

Although BTER and exco.in are getting attention, they’re not the only exchanges currently experiencing problems. The exchange Cryptorush suffered a hack in April of last year, and was recovering when they recently disappeared without a trace. Currently their website is down, and their last tweet is from 10 days ago. None of their tweets discuss scheduled maintenance.This could be a transient state, or it could be Cryptorush’s end.

CCEDK

Another big name in the Bitcoin trading industry is currently down as well, CCEDK. Unlike Cryptorush, CCEDK has been active on twitter to let their users know that their funds are safe. On twitter, CCEDK announced, "We have been experiencing a DOS attack, all funds are safe, we close however briefly next 5 hours for a security check. #CCEDK"

About ten hours later, CCEDK was still experiencing difficulties;

"@cryptog1 @CCEDK_ yes another stronger ddos attack made it necessary to take site down again, they had no luck this time either".

CCEDK is still tweeting fairly regularly regarding the attacks. They claim the complete safety of all user funds. At the time of writing CCEDK was still down.

HitBTC

HitBTC users can no longer withdraw from their accounts due to what is thought to be an attack. HitBTC explained the situation to CoinTelegraph, "We have not confirmed that the attacks are connected, moreover, our hosting partners have not confirmed that the incident is actually a hacker attack. In our Terminal, you can see an official notice about the payment system downtime. No user funds were affected on our side. We will allow deposits/withdrawals as soon as we finish the security checks on our side. Appropriate security measures are being implemented on our side and we have a proactive security policy."

On the other side of the globe Huobi, a large chinese exchange, suffered attacks but claims that funds are currently safe. Huobi announced the experience on twitter, "Huobi has been experiencing a severe DDOS attack but no security breach – deposits and withdrawals are available as normal."