Rabu, 05 September 2012

Virtual Bank Robber Gets Away with $250,000 in Bitcoin Heist


Bitcoin may be the future of currency, a scam, wishful thinking, a truly anonymous form of money, an elaborate Ponzi scheme and so on, depending on who you ask.

But one thing's for sure, Bitcoins have value, though it fluctuates daily, and some people have become quite rich in Bitcoins.

And given that you can actually buy things with the currency, being rich in Bitcoins is almost as good as being rich in actual money.

Just like with actual money though, some people would rather not have to work for them. The modern day bank robber doesn't done a ski mask and blows the safe door with C4 (OK so maybe that was never actually true, except in the movies).

He, or she, finds his way onto the server of a Bitcoin exchange, stumbles upon an unencrypted backup of all the Bitcoins owned by said exchange, copies the data and becomes 24,000 BTC richer which, at the current exchange rates is over, $250,000 or €200,000.

This part isn't from a movie script unfortunately, since that's what happened to BitFloor, one of the big exchanges in the US.

"Last night, a few of our servers were compromised. As a result, the attacker gained accesses to an unencrypted backup of the wallet keys (the actual keys live in an encrypted area). Using these keys they were able to transfer the coins. This attack took the vast majority of the coins BitFloor was holding on hand," BitFloor's owner Roman Shtylman wrote.

BitFloor doesn't really make that much money from the transactions, it only takes a 0.3 percent commission, so it won't be able to reimburse users. The last resort would be to shut down BitFloor entirely, but the owner may be in talks with some investors that would cover the damages.

There is, of course, the possibility of the hacker being caught by the police, though investigations into virtual heists like these are rare and complicated.

Bitcoins have several advantages over the regular financial systems, and the fact that theyĆ¢€™re mostly untraceable being the biggest one. But in this case, this is precisely why it's hard to recoup the losses.

What's more, there's no backup system of any sort, an insurance for example. And this is hardly the first heist of this sort.

Via: Virtual Bank Robber Gets Away with $250,000 in Bitcoin Heist

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