Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Million-Dollar Robbery Rocks Bitcoin Exchange; Customers Lose Big

Bitcoin Internet Payment Services, a Denmark-based exchange billing itself as Europe's biggest, was robbed of bitcoins worth more than $1 million in a theft that took place over the course of the past several days, NetworkWorld reports.

NW continues:
BIPS was apparently targeted by a distributed denial-of-service attack earlier this month. A follow-up attack, according to bitcoin news site Coindesk, subsequently knocked out key security systems and allowed the thieves to make off with 1,295 BTC.

In response to the incident, BIPS said in a statement that it was forced to pull the consumer payments functionality of its services off-line, and warned users that they would have to transfer any balances to a different wallet service.

“BIPS will temporarily close down the wallet initiative to focus on real-time merchant processing business which does not include storing of Bitcoins,” the statement said, adding that BIPS will attempt to re-open its consumer wallet service with improved security measures in the future.

BIPS customers aren’t happy with the exchange’s response to the incident. Many have taken to the Bitcointalk forums to accuse BIPS’ leadership of carelessness – and, in several cases, hinted at actual malfeasance. One user, who says he or she lost 90 BTC (about $71,000, at the time of this writing), has created an online form so that others can sign up to be part of possible legal action against BIPS.

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