A major hack hits investment platform Atlas Quantum, with over a quarter of a million customer records compromised…

A treasure trove of hundreds of thousands of email addresses, account balances, names and phone numbers of cryptocurrency investors has been stolen after Brazilian investment platform Atlas Quantum suffered a large scale hack.

Atlas Quantum is a crypto trading platform that cl aims to offer automated arbitrage based on real-time movements in cryptocurrency markets. The company says it has over 240,000 customers in more than 50 countries, and more than $30 million in assets under management.

Personally identifiable data from 261,463 investors was stolen, according to security researcher Troy Hunt, who first publicised the leak.

Hunt runs HaveIBeenPwned.com, a free access database where members of the public can search their own email addresses to see if they have been compromised or otherwise unlawfully shared online.

In a statement posted on Facebook on Sunday, Atlas Quantum CEO Rodrigo Marquez admitted that his company’s systems had failed to stop the breach and that customer details had been exposed.

Some of the platform’s features have been disabled, said Marquez, while teams investigate the leak.

“We became aware early on Saturday night that a security incident involving the leakage of data from our customers occurred.

“We are monitoring the affected accounts and working to have additional protection against fraud.”

Marquez insisted that no cryptocurrencies had been stolen from exchanges or custody wallets for any of the 261,000 affected accounts.

“At the time of the incident we took immediate steps to protect the database and passwords and private keys remain encrypted,” he added.

The Atlas Quantum hack represents yet another large-scale data breach from major cryptocurrency platforms worldwide.

According to security thinktank the Igarape Institute, Brazil is in the grip of a cybercrime problem which is only getting worse.

The country ranks second in the world in online banking fraud and financial malware, while the number of cyberattacks increased 197 percent in 2014, with data theft accounting for around $4 billion in losses every year.

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