14 DAY TRIAL // Honk Kong-based Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange service Gatecoin announced Saturday night the theft of a large amount of cryptocurrency following what they believe was a server intrusion.
The company says it lost 250 Bitcoin ($114,500) and 185,000 Ethereum ($1,850,000), totaling over $2,000,000.
Gatecoin data breach took place last week
Gatecoin says they suspect the data breach started last Monday, on May 9, late night local time, when one of its servers mysteriously rebooted.
The company's investigators, aided by security experts from Tehtri Security say that the crooks kept chipping away at Gatecoin's network until Thursday evening, May 12.
Things started going wrong on Friday night, May 13, when the exchange's admins started seeing some suspicious transactions. Following a quick assessment, the admins shut down the service immediately.
Crooks stole from the exchange's "hot wallet" fund
According to a statement posted on the site Saturday evening by Gatecoin CEO Aurélien Menant, the crooks managed to reach the company's hot wallet funds.
These are funds kept in Gatecoin's central account to help intermediate transactions until the real ones get approved and recorded on the real blockchain.
The hackers could not touch the rest of the funds, which Gatecoin had stored in multi-sig cold wallets, much harder to tamper with. ShapeShift Bitcoin trader suffered a similar incident last month, when hackers also stole funds from its hot wallet.
Hackers stole 15% of Gatecoin's funds
The $2 million heist represents 15 percent of Gatecoin's total funds. Nevertheless, the company has already put together a plan to reimburse any affected users. Gatecoin customers will be able to withdraw funds starting May 28.
In the meantime, the company said it managed to find and isolate the addresses used by crooks to exfiltrate the funds. The investigators discovered six Bitcoin and four Ethereum addresses.
Gatecoin says other Bitcoin exchange services volunteered to give a helping hand and watch out for any transactions from these wallets and track the funds as they're moved along the blockchain.