Altsbit Exchange Loses Most of Its Funds in a Massive Hack

The relatively new Altsbit exchange has suffered a massive hack. In fact, the information released by the company behind it suggests that “almost all funds” were stolen. This follows on from news of the recent hacking of Cryptopia.

Details of the Hack

Details of this attack were first given on Twitter at the end of last week. They confirmed that the exchange was “hacked during the night”. The tweet confirmed the loss of the majority of their funds held in BTC, ETH, ARRR and VRSC.

The company confirmed on the message that a “small part of the funds” were safe. This is because they were being held in cold wallets.

Following on from this, their website gave more precise details of the amount stolen by hackers. This also mentioned that users would get partial refunds based on the amount of coins that the Altsbit exchange still holds.

• They lost 6,929 coins out of the 14,782 Bitcoin held. 7.853 BTC will returned to their users
• In terms of ETH, 23,210 were stolen out of the total of 32,262. This leaves a refund of 9.052.
• From a total of 9,619,754 ARRR token, they lost 3,924,082. So they can return 5,695,672.
• Their total of 852,726 VRSC coins dropped by 414,154. This means that 438,572 are available for refunds.
• KMD wasn’t mentioned in their tweet. However, the message on their site confirmed that 1,066 were lost out of 48015, giving 46,949 to be refunded.

The refund process runs from 10 February to 8 May. Customers are advised to make their refund request quickly as the “Altsbit platform will be terminated” after this date.

More Information on Altsbit

Most reports on this hack state that the Altsbit exchange is based in Italy. However, their site doesn’t appear to confirm this.

They started out in 2018. Most reviews of the service have been fairly average. It is noted that their charges for withdrawing BTC in USD are high and that deposits can’t be made in fiat.

What Has the Reaction Been Like?

As you would expect, there has been widespread anger on social media at this hack. Many users have pointed out that they should have stored most of the currency on cold wallets and kept a small amount on the exchange. Instead, they did it the opposite way around.

Some sceptics also claimed that this could be an exit strategy rather than a hack. However, the black hat hackers LulzSec seemed to admit the attack by saying that “@altsbit didn’t had proper security to stop Lulz Canon”.

This latest in a series of security breaches shows why it is important to only deal with the best, most reliable cryptocurrency exchanges.