Cryptopia, Hacked Last Month, Gives an Estimate of Stolen Crypto

By Kapil Gauhar

After being silent over the matter, Cryptopia finally published a series of updates through Twitter on Wednesday. Most notably, the firm provided an update on how much of the total digital assets held by the platform was lost in the cyber-attack.

“We are continuing to work on assessing the impact incurred as a result of the hack in January. Currently, we have calculated that worst case 9.4% of our total holdings was stolen.”

However, it did not provide the exact idea of that amount in monetary terms.

Cryptopia went offline on January 15, saying that it had suffered a security breach which resulted in major losses. The cryptocurrency exchange didn’t provide any particular information at the time and has said that it can’t comment on the matter as long as an investigation by the New Zealand Police is underway.

After the cyber attack, a blockchain data analytics firm assessed as much as $16 million in Ether and ERC-20 tokens could have been lost.

Notably, hackers still had control over the exchange even after the police had been brought in and reportedly stole an additional 1,675 Ether from 17,000 wallets, which is an amount worth about $181,000.

According to the Cryptopia’s tweet, the cryptocurrency exchange is securing each cryptocurrency wallet individually to make sure that it’s fully secure before resuming the trading.

Also, Cryptopia warned –

“As a result of the new wallets please immediately refrain from depositing funds into old Cryptopia addresses. We have more updates to come tomorrow, keep an eye on our page.”

On February 7, New Zealand Police said that it expected to complete the inspection of Cryptopia’s premises by the mid of the month. The firm confirmed in a tweet on February 14 that the police had given them access back to its building, while the investigation was under process.

Greg Murton, a detective inspector of the New Zealand Police, said –

“The focus is on identifying those behind this offending and retrieving the stolen cryptocurrency. This investigation is expected to take a considerable amount of time to resolve due to the complexity of the cyber environment.”