14 DAY TRIAL // Bitcoinica has been taken offline by its administrators after they’ve noticed a suspicious transaction. It’s believed that at least 18,000 BTC ($90,000 or 68,000 EUR) have been stolen.
“Today, we have discovered a suspicious Bitcoin transaction that doesn't seem to be initiated by any one of the company owners. Some of them are not online at the moment so this is not conclusive,” Bitcoinica representatives wrote.
“We have contacted Rackspace to suspend all our servers and lock down our accounts. All your trading and financial data is safe (as far as I know), apart from the Bitcoin loss. Thank you for your patience and understanding while we investigate this issue in detail.”
Many criticized the site’s owners for keeping such amounts of currency on hosted systems instead of using offline transactions and disconnecting the wallets from the trading infrastructure, especially after the Linode incident.
However, Bitcoin representatives responded that 80% of the Bitcoins are in fact in offline wallets, but the large number of withdrawals forces them to keep a large balance accessible.
In a later post on the BitcoinTalk forum, a Bitcoinica employee revealed that the problem is far more serious than initially believed. They estimate that the entire platform will be shut down or even re-developed, operation which may take months.
It appears that the incident may have been a result of a compromised email server that belongs to one of the teams.
In the meantime, until they get everything back and running, they advised users not to reuse their passwords, but also to be on the lookout for phishing emails that may leverage this unfortunate event.
The incident comes after a few days ago the FBI released a report in which it detailed the fact that Bitcoins represent a great currency for cybercriminals who want their illegal activities to go by unnoticed.