Cryptopia Hack Continues, Hackers Syphon Off Funds Worth USD 180K Again

By Swati Kishore

As we had reported some time ago, the New Zealand-based digital asset exchange Cryptopia was hacked on January 14, 2019. While the exchange had announced on Twitter that the ‘platform was put under maintenance as soon as the hack was identified by the staff,’ however, the exchange’s troubles don’t seem to come to an end. Just 15 days after the announcement, Cryptopia has experienced another loss of funds from the same group of hackers.

Sources from the Blockchain analytics company Elementus have revealed that the same hackers involved in the Cryptopia attack on January 14, 2019, have yet again syphoned off Ethereum cryptocurrency worth as much as USD 180,000 from the wallets of unsuspecting Cryptopia users on January 28, 2019.

The first hacking attack on Cryptopia had resulted in digital currencies worth USD 16 million being stolen from the exchange’s wallet. Now, Elementus reports that the new attack has affected 17 thousand Cryptopia wallets.

As per the analysis by Elementus, out of the 17,000 wallets, almost 5,240 were also attacked during the first hack. Since the hackers had emptied all these wallets, we can only conclude that the users had again put in funds in the compromised wallets.

Now the question remains as to why the wallet owners would again deposit funds in wallets after the attack. The first reason could be that the users were unaware of the hacking attack on Cryptopia, and the second could be that the funds are being deposited automatically as currency earned through mining pools.

Another round of attack by hackers leads us to believe that the exchange has lost control of the wallet’s private keys. The recently stolen funds have again been moved to the same Ethereum address as before by the precocious hackers. Elementus revealed in their report,

“Initially, it wasn’t clear whether this might be Cryptopia securing their remaining funds, but by 9:50 PM this evening, it became obvious this was indeed the same thief. At that time, the incoming transfers stopped and the combined funds were moved into the address below, the same wallet that currently stores the other stolen Cryptopia funds.”

With the loss of the private keys by Cryptopia to hackers, it seems like little can be done to prevent the digital thieves from stealing funds stored in the wallets. If you are a Cryptopia user, then it would be wise not to store any more crypto in your Cryptopia wallet.