Hackers steal $23.5m from Bancor wallet

Bancor, the decentralized exchange, said on Monday night that a vulnerability in one of its wallets had left it exposed to hackers who stole $23.5m in cryptocurrency tokens.

The company, which last year raised $153m in an initial coin offering, to fund the creation of the exchange, said on Twitter it had experience a security breach as hackers infiltrated a wallet it had used to upgrade a number of smart contracts.

No individual user wallets were compromised, however, the company said in a statement on Twitter.

Here is the latest update on the recent security breach: pic.twitter.com/JroypFvBri

— Bancor (@Bancor) July 9, 2018

Stolen tokens

It added that the thieves had stolen ether tokens valued at $12.5m, around $10m worth of its native bancor token and $1m in pundi X.

Bancor said that its own token had been frozen thanks to a built-in safety protocol.

“The ability to freeze tokens was built into the Bancor Protocol to be used in an extreme situation to recover from a security breach, allowing Bancor to effectively stop the thief from running away with the stolen tokens,” the company said on Twitter.

Working with exchanges

The stolen ether tokens, however, remained lost and Bancor said it was working with dozens of crypto exchanges to help trace the stolen funds, or at least make it harder for the thieves to liquidate them.

The company added it had temporarily moved to maintenance and would be back online as soon as possible. It said it would post further updates on Twitter and Telegraph.