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Bitcoin Japan Software

$500 Million Worth of Cryptocurrency Stolen From Japanese Exchange (cnbc.com) 104

Posted by BeauHD from the gone-in-the-blink-of-an-eye dept.
Locke2005 shares a report from CNBC: Hackers stole several hundred million dollars' worth of a lesser-known cryptocurrency from a major Japanese exchange Friday. Coincheck said that around 523 million of the exchange's NEM coins were sent to another account around 3 a.m. local time (1 p.m. ET Thursday), according to a Google translate of a Japanese transcript of the Friday press conference from Logmi. The exchange has about 6 percent of yen-bitcoin trading, ranking fourth by market share on CryptoCompare. The stolen NEM coins were worth about 58 billion yen at the time of detection, or roughly $534.8 million, according to the exchange. Coincheck subsequently restricted withdrawals of all currencies, including yen, and trading of cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin. Locke2005 adds, "That, my friends, is the prime reason why speculating in cryptocurrency is a bad idea!"

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$500 Million Worth of Cryptocurrency Stolen From Japanese Exchange More

$500 Million Worth of Cryptocurrency Stolen From Japanese Exchange

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  • Moron (Score:4, Informative)

    by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Friday January 26, 2018 @05:49PM (#56011587)

    Anyone who leaves any balance of coins or fiat currency in an online exchange is a moron.

    If you want to speculate, mine / buy your coins, store them in you OWN wallet, then move them to the exchange when you want to sell them.

    • Re:Moron (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Friday January 26, 2018 @05:54PM (#56011631) Homepage Journal

      Anyone who leaves any balance of coins or fiat currency in an online exchange is a moron.

      If you want to speculate, mine / buy your coins, store them in you OWN wallet, then move them to the exchange when you want to sell them.

      I mostly agree with this sentiment. You shouldn't store anything online until you're ready to use, but what if I moved a pile of $100K worth of coins 5 minutes before the hack? These sites should still be responsible for losses.

      • Use smaller amounts and multiple exchanges.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msauve ( 701917 )
      Yeah, that's just it. "Locke2005 adds, "That, my friends, is the prime reason why speculating in cryptocurrency is a bad idea!"?" No. Speculation is bad because it entails high risk, whether tulip bulbs, subprime mortgages, or crypto currencies. The prime reason for trouble with crypto (if you're willing to take the risk) is letting someone else hold your wallet.

      Traditional equities (stock markets/bonds) have well established and proven methods of maintaining accounts with reasonable security. These new fa
      • Crypto currencies are a zero sum game in the best case. There is many paid in by investors / speculators / morons and there is money paid out to current owners of the currencies. These amounts are the same. So on average an investor / speculator / moron isn't going to make money.

        But it's not even a zero sum game, because there is cost involved for mining, for the work involved, cost of infrastructure and so on. And on top of that, there are criminals that from time to time get considerable amounts of cur

    • Re:Moron (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Friday January 26, 2018 @07:04PM (#56012173)
      The banks have figured out how to make it (relatively) safe. If a cryptocurrency exchange hasn't figured it out, the fault is theirs.

      The point of putting your money (or crypto coins) in a bank or exchange service is because it's become too valuable to keep on hand. Your advice to keep it in your own wallet makes sense if you have a couple hundred bucks in coins. But if you've got (say) $100,000 in coins, you'd be an idiot to keep it in your own wallet where a fire or burglar or forgetting your password could potentially cause you to lose the coins. We put valuables (money, coins, jewelry, important papers, etc) in a bank because they've paid millions of dollars to put together secure storage, and will lease space in it to you for a nominal fee.

      The problem happens when you store your coins in an online exchange, under the assumption that because they're big and online they must have spent millions of dollars to put together secure storage.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        And what's stopping you from putting the majority of your crypto-coin into a wallet and then you know, ENCRYPTING that wallet with a good password. Then you can back it up everywhere and anywhere because it's encrypted. I back up my passwords to my email accounts because they're safely encrypted.

    • Re:Moron (Score:5, Insightful)

      by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Friday January 26, 2018 @07:57PM (#56012439)

      Anyone who leaves any balance of coins or fiat currency in an online exchange is a moron.

      If you want to speculate, mine / buy your coins, store them in you OWN wallet, then move them to the exchange when you want to sell them.

      Store where?

      On your computer? Just wait for a keylogger virus to clean you out.

      Offline on a spare HD? Hope the HD doesn't die, oh, and be careful a keylogger virus isn't running when you plug it back in.

      Redundant duel backups in separate safety deposit boxes and a special offline machine with which to do set up the transfer? Sounds like a lot of work.

      Oh, and make sure you can remember your password in 5 years.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by shubus ( 1382007 )
      Common sense is not so common. Lazy people are paying the price.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If you do any sort of frequent trading, you need to keep it on the exchange though. Many exchanges charge withdrawal fees, which are sometimes quite significant. There can also be delays of several minutes or even hours when trying to transfer back and forth to an exchange, causing you to miss an opportunity. I don't disagree that you should keep them in your own wallet if you are just holding them though.

    • Open a coin exchange
      Make it easy to save your wallet ...and awkward to remove it
      Wait till a few million/billion is deposited
      Claim Hackers Stole My Homework (TM)
      Profit!

  • what? bad idea? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spatley ( 191233 ) <spatley@yahoo.com> on Friday January 26, 2018 @05:50PM (#56011591) Homepage

    "That, my friends, is the prime reason why speculating in cryptocurrency is a bad idea!"

    It seems that if this stuff is worth stealing, it has value. Wouldn't that make it a good candidate for speculative investment? Now allowing some half-assed third party to hold my investment in a way that could allow hackers to gain control of my funds, now that sounds like a bad idea.

  • If imaginary money is stolen is it still theft? (Score:5, Funny)

    by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Friday January 26, 2018 @05:50PM (#56011593)
    If so I'd like to report $15,140 stolen from a Monopoly game I own that's gone missing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kiviQr ( 3443687 )
      y, I am missing a couple hotels on the Boardwalk!!!

      • y, I am missing a couple hotels on the Boardwalk!!!

        Psst! Dude, want a really good deal on monopoly hotels? Theres a sale on ebay for 12 000 hotels for 960$ or best offer!!

      • I found those and a black sock in my dryer with my laundry, are they yours?

    • If so I'd like to report $15,140 stolen from a Monopoly game I own that's gone missing.

      So, according to the exchange rate on amazon you suffered losses of about 20 USD?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If so I'd like to report $15,140 stolen from a Monopoly game I own that's gone missing.

      This post written from a laptop purchase with "imaginary" money generated by a computer purchased with more "imaginary" money that came from gaming rig bought for gaming but mining in it's off time.

      I know it's supposed to be cute but it's really just more ignorant FUD by people too stubborn or stupid to understand how to work what's happening now and for the past couple of years. I'm sorry you're missing the down pour of "imaginary" money but enjoy your "imaginary" stocks or whatever you do to invest. Those

    • Sorry to burst peoples' bubbles, but monopoly money is more real than this cryptology (-- why is chrome flagging this as misspelled?) based blockchain currency numbers game.

  • While malware scammers are focused on extorting people for cash by using cryptocurrencies (aka ransomware), I foresee the next iteration, a totally pervasive malware network that does only one thing: identify and steal cryptocurrency. Current malware has the problem of being easy to identify infected machine behavior but when the only thing you are doing is looking then you can spread far and wide like stuxnet, doing nothing but looking for something. Then when you they find your wallet, they just send a

    • There is a new cryptocurrency called Nimiq coming out soon that’s designed to be mined with a Web browser using Javascript. It’s designed to be GPU and ASIC “resistant”, meaning that most people will be mining in with ordinary desktop CPU’s at least initially.

      I can only imagine the various types of malware that are going to show up for mining that cryptocurrency.

      • You can not write an algorithm that is GPU or ASIC "resistant", what ever that is supposed to mean in your nomenclatur.

        An ASIC is just an algorithm "burned into hardware" instead of a flow of instructions for a normal CPU. You can put everything into an ASIC.

        • Not exactly true. While you can "put everything into an ASIC", it not the case that it may be cost effective to do so. ASICs are good at doing one thing REALLY fast. So, for example, an ASIC processing the Bitcoin SHA256 hash is much faster than any general purpose processor. However, the SHA256 hash is not memory intensive...all you need is the ASIC. There is currently a variety of cryptocurrency algorithms that are truly ASIC resistant in that they are very memory intensive: Cryptonight, Equihash, LyraRe
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This is the same country that gave us the previous major crypto-currency fiasco. Mt Gox lost 650,000 BTC - roughly $7.2B (as in billion) at today's prices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
  • It is the future currency validated by millions of independent miners.

    In no time, those millions will spring into action, find the perp who stole the money and restore the status quo ante.

    You fiat currency believers need to file a case and wait for some government agency to investigate find the perp, and try to recover the stolen goods.

    Er, what...? There is no real peaceful conflict resolution mechanism? Its finders keepers losers weepers rule from third grade! What! You gotta be kidding....

  • You know what I love most about cryptocurrency? It's decentralized!

  • Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet with these constant thefts - the exchange knows which coins were stolen, it is illegal to knowingly trade in stolen goods so these subchains ought to be blacklisted from trading in most countries.

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