Russian cryptocurrency exchange Livecoinannouncedon its official website that it had been breached by hackers and that it had lost control of some of servers . In the same statement, the company warned customers to stop using the services.
According to posts circulating on social media, the attack took place on the night between December 23 and December 24.
The hackers took control of Livecoin's IT infrastructure and then proceeded to modify the exchange rates.
Livecoin administrators managed to regain access to some of their systems on December 24 and found that the Bitcoin exchange rate had risen from its normal $23,000/BTC to more than $450,000/BTC, while Ether rose from $600/ETH to $15,000.
Once the exchange rates were modified, the attackers began cashing out accounts, generating huge profits.
In the announcement on the site, the administrators of the Livecoin exchange service described the incident as a “carefully planned attack, with a lot of preparation, as we assume, over the last few months.”
“We have lost control of all servers, backends and nodes. Therefore, we were unable to stop our service in time. Our news channels were also compromised,” the company said.
"At the moment, we are partially controlling the frontend and that is how we can make this announcement," he added.
Livecoin urges users to stop depositing money and making transactions.
As is the case with similar cryptocurrency attacks, many users claim that the entire hack was an inside job.
Livecoin, for its part, said it has informed local authorities about the breach incident.
According to CoinMarketCap, Livecoin is ranked 173rd on the list of cryptocurrency exchanges on the Internet, with $16 million worth of transactions per day. The service launched in March 2014.
Source: ZDNet
