Over $5 million confirmed stolen in Bitstamp hack

While the Bitstamp exchange is still offline, its team has shared some more details about the compromise they suffered recently.

“On January 4th, some of Bitstamp’s operational wallets were compromised, resulting in a loss of less than 19,000 BTC. Upon learning of the breach, we immediately notified all customers that they should no longer make deposits to previously issued bitcoin deposit addresses,” they pointed out.

“This breach represents a small fraction of Bitstamp’s total bitcoin reserves, the overwhelming majority of which are held in secure offline cold storage systems. We would like to reassure all Bitstamp customers that their balances held prior to our temporary suspension of services will not be affected and will be honored in full.”

They are also apparently working on “transferring a secure backup of the Bitstamp site onto a new safe environment” and are hoping to bring the exchange back online very soon.

19,000 BTC is currently worth a little over $5 million.

ToNewsTo has some interesting theories about how the hack and bitcoin exfiltration was executed. The address to which the stolen money was transferred has apparently been located, and the actual amount is 18,870 bitcoins, which could be as much as 12 percent of the total amount that Bitstamp handled before the compromise.