Hackers bring Bitcoin trading platform to four-week halt

Bitcoin trading platform BitQuick has revealed that is was hacked on 14 March, resulting in the company shutting down its server and notifying sellers of withdrawal instructions. The company is conducting an investigation into the breach, which will include verifying the attack vector and a complete audit of the source code for existing and potential security holes, taking between two and four weeks.

In light of the recent Cryptsy debacle where millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies went missing after a malicious attack, another cryptocurrency ...

In light of the recent Cryptsy debacle where millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies went missing after a malicious attack, another cryptocurrency exchange in BitQuick has become victim to hackers.

In a blog post published on their website on March 17th, 2016, Founder and CEO as well as Customer Service Rep. (respectively) Jad Mubaslat & Chad Davis posted that the BitQuick servers were breached on March 14th, 2016. Unlike Cryptsy, the team at BitQuick hasn’t kept this breach a secret from its users for long and is updating publicly on their progress in dealing with the situation.

According to the post, no customer information was lost, no funds were stolen and emails were also secured in the process of the attack. All sellers were emailed withdrawal instructions and outstanding orders and withdrawals have been processed to the point where only 3% of all funds within the BitQuick system have gone unclaimed.

Due to the unknown extent of the attack, the server was immediately shut down and the blog states that BitQuick will not resume regular services including trading until they are 100% certain that they will be able to continue operations confidently. This process, which will include verifying the attack vector and doing a complete audit of the source code for existing and potential future security holes is slated to be anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks in total.

Founded in August 2013, BitQuick was the first US trading platform to implement proof of reserves following the Mt. Gox incident and have grown to 1.5M 30-day trailing volume since their founding. In what is stated to be unrelated to the server breach, BitQuick stated in the same blog post that they are also searching for a new management team for “personal reasons.” No connection to the 2-4 week downtime was mentioned and there are no specifics available to whom within the management team or how many individuals have parted with BitQuick.

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