14 DAY TRIAL // On Sunday, hackers breached the official blog of Mark Karpeles, the CEO of the Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. After gaining access to balances, the hackers have determined that Karpeles lied to customers when he said that their Bitcoins had been stolen.
The hackers have published a post on Karpeles’ blog, along with links to stolen information. The post added by the attackers has been removed, but it’s still available via Google’s cache.
“It’s time that MTGOX got the bitcoin communities wrath instead of Bitcoin Community getting Goxed. This release would have been sooner, but in spirit of responsible disclosure and making sure all of ducks were in a row, it took a few days longer than would have liked to verify the data,” the hackers wrote.
They haven’t leaked any user data because they only want to get back at the Bitcoin exchange service, not its customers.
However, they have published what appears to be a file containing Bitcoin transactions, a CV of Karpeles, some applications used by Mt. Gox, and a screenshot to demonstrate that they’ve gained access to the company’s databases. The information is contained in a 716 Mb archive file.
On one hand, the hackers say they haven’t stolen any Bitcoins because there “were not to steal.” On the other hand, they’ve published balances for various currencies.
Next to the BTC balance, which shows 951,116 Bitcoins, the hackers wrote, “That fat [expletive] has been lying!”
Forbes highlights that the information leaked by the hackers doesn’t necessarily demonstrate that Mt. Gox has been lying to customers about their coins being stolen. It could simply mean that the exchange’s accounting shows the Bitcoins before being stolen.
Mt. Gox claims to have lost a total of 850,000 Bitcoins, 750,000 of which belonging to customers. However, experts say they haven’t seen the coins being moved.
At the beginning of March, we reported that hackers claimed to have breached Mt. Gox’s systems in an effort to find out what happened. At the time, a user with the online moniker “nanashi____” leaked a conversation between Karpeles and a Japanese banker, and some Mt. Gox staff information.
In a post published on Bitcoin Talk on Sunday, nanashi offered to sell 20 Gb of data allegedly stolen from Mt. Gox. He asked for 100BTC for the data.
“Selling it one or two times to make up personal loses from gox closure,” nanashi wrote.
Bitcoin Talk has removed the post, but it can still be viewed through Google’s cache.