After three years of lurking, Bitfinex was hacked and hackers began to transfer 300 bitcoins

Nearly three years after the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex was hacked, about 300 stolen Bitcoins were recently transferred. In the summer of 2016, hackers attacked the exchange, causing the company to lose $73 million in cryptocurrency.

Image source: pexels

The 300 stolen Bitcoins appear to have been transferred to 13 new addresses in total. This is the first time these coins have been transferred to a new wallet, and these wallets have not had any trading history before.

• Exchange 5 hotspot tracking: The relationship between platform currency and IEO is like stocks and futures
• What kind of blockchain deposit has legal effect? Hangzhou Internet Court gives four elements
• Bitfinex, Tether and the public are openly confronted, is 5.7 billion "frozen" or "evaporated"?

Stolen Bitcoin begins to shift

Reddit user u/jankeldidi initially made the community notice the moving coins through a post on the social news forum. In the post, he lists 13 addresses associated with Bitfinex hacking, and the coins in those addresses have been emptied. The user also provides a link to a GitHub entry that shows more than 2,000 addresses that are used to receive coins from affected Bitfinex users.

A total of 300 bitcoins are currently being transferred to a new wallet worth about $1.65 million. These new addresses have no previous transaction history, which means that the identity of the hacker will continue to be a mystery.

These transferred bitcoins are related to the hacking incident that took place in August 2016. It exploited the vulnerability of Bitfinex's multi-signature system, causing customers to lose $73 million in bitcoin. According to Bitcoin.com, the total number of stolen Bitcoins is 120,000.

With the help of the US government, the exchange has managed to return most of the money affected by the hacker attack, and even recovered some of the bitcoin related to the 2016 event.

The Bitfinex hacking in 2016 had a huge impact on the cryptographic industry that was just getting started, and bitcoin prices fell by 20%. Understandably, this also caused Bitfinex to refuse to provide all services to users for a long time.

This is actually the second time that Bitfinex has had such an event for more than a year. The previous time occurred in May 2015, but that impact on the exchange and the encryption industry was much smaller, when hackers stole only 1,500 bitcoins.

Learn from the car: Protect your own cryptocurrency

Although three years have passed since the recent Bitfinex theft, the fact that these stolen coins are still circulating should warn all those who choose to keep the cryptocurrency on the exchange. Most of the customers affected by the hacking were ultimately lucky, and eventually received their bitcoin or equivalent in other currencies as compensation, but the time spent on this process was tortuous for them.

Because so many customers ignore the basics of secure storage of private keys and cryptocurrencies, exchanges often hold huge value on behalf of users. For hackers, this is an attractive honeypot, and if they can successfully break the security of the trading floor, they can steal millions of dollars, or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

We will continue to update Blocking; if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!