On March 10, 2020, IOTA Foundation announced on their official blog that they have now rebooted their Coordinator, which has been shut for almost a month and implemented measures to protect user tokens.

IOTA built a new tool, IOTA Seed Migration Tool, to help users to migrate to a new safe account and apply to all customers who used Trinity between December 12, 2019, and February 17, 2020.

The update comes a few weeks after their official Trinity Wallet was attacked through its dependency on MoonPay. According to their official statement on Twitter, 8.55 Ti was stolen from 50 compromised user accounts.

IOTA Tokens Are Now Secure, After the Migration

Soon after detecting the suspicious activity, IOTA performed a temporary shutdown of their Coordinator to protect user wallet and prevent further theft:

“Currently, IOTA is working with law enforcement and cybersecurity experts to investigate a coordinated attack, resulting in stolen funds. To protect our users, we have paused the Coordinator and advise users not to open Trinity until further notice.”

IOTA first notified and advised users to update their Trinity wallets and change their passwords. The next step was to download the tool and use it to migrate each seed, but only once and to safeguard their migration logs on their computers:

“The tool has been thoroughly tested by the IOTA Foundation and audited by a leading security firm.”

IOTA then proceeded to process submissions after the migration window closed to verify there were no conflicts:

“A conflicting migration would indicate that two individuals had attempted to migrate the same account, and an identity check (KYC) would be required to determine the rightful token claimant.”

The Network’s nodes would then validate all the submitted migrations to allow migrated users to see their token updates upon the restart of the Coordination.

Coordinator’s Reactivation Comes after the End of the Migration Period

IOTA released the migration tool on February 29 and encouraged users to migrate within the stipulated eight days window.

“It is an easy to use a piece of software for macOS, Windows, and Linux that automatically migrates IOTA Tokens from potentially compromised seeds onto a new, unaffected seed.”

The IOTA Coordinator is an application that protects Tangle from attacks and allows user transactions to go from pending to confirm by helping nodes to reach a consensus.

For those who might have missed the migration window, IOTA stated that a manual transfer is still applicable. However, since the Coordinator has been reenabled, tokens on the old seed are still at risk.

IOTA has thanked their community for their patience and cooperation and regrets the events that caused the chain of events leading up to this moment: