Cryptopia’s latest attacks

Cryptopia, the New Zealand cryptocurrency exchange platform that was hacked on January 14th, just recently underwent yet another huge loss from the same hackers. It has been over two weeks since the last attack and its continuity highlights that thousands of Cryptopia wallets may still be at risk. During the first attack, $16 million worth of crypto was stolen from the exchange.

The stolen cash is said to have been ‘shuffled around in small pieces’ and eventually moved into different exchanges to cash them out. These exchanges include, HitBTC, Bibox, Huobi, Biitrex, Binance and several others.

According to Elementus, the blockchain analysis firm that has kept a close eye on the Cryptopia hack, the same hackers siphoned an additional 1,674 Ethereum (ETH) from another 17, 000 Crytopia wallets. The total Ethereum siphoned amounts to $180,000. However, Inspector Greg Murton, a Detective from Canterbury police claims that the total amount of crypto that was stolen was more than $180,000.

These hacks however seem pretty unusual and have raised concerns that perhaps the platform has lost all control over all its private keys. Elementus confirms this to be true. Another quite unusual fact about these hacks is that, Cryptopia users have continued depositing funds into their wallets despite the hack. Elementus relates this to the fact that ‘’Most of the funds are coming from mining pools. Presumably, these payments are being sent on behalf of miners who opted to receive their rewards automatically via “direct deposit,” and have since forgotten about it’’.

Further Allegations by the Police

As posted on Stuff, police are disputing claims that another quarter million dollars worth of cryptocurrency has yet again been drained from the Canterbury-based trading platform and marketplace. Allegedly, the police began their investigation on January 16th right after the first hack. According to the Canterbury police department 250,000 was transferred without authorization.

As said earlier, Cryptopia is a combined cryptocurrency exchange, trading platform and marketplace. The platform was designed to facilitate the buying, selling and trading of almost anything using crypto and it now has over 1.4 million users.

Exchanges are advised to freeze any stolen funds as soon as attempts to trade them were made.