Not only has the crypto-currency market gained investor attention but has also attracted hackers. These hackers mean to steal crypto-currencies by taking advantage of certain loopholes. Similarly, recently such an incident took place, where the DNS Server of Black Wallet was hacked leading to a stolen converted to USD amount of $400,000.
Blackwallet.co is an online application which offers services for the Stellar Lumen cryptocurrency. Basically, the DNS server was hacked. This was then redirected to the thieves’ own server.
Therefore, if you were one of the users to log on the website, you were to be taken to a different website than the original. There is a condition though. There needed to be at least 20 Stellar Lumen coins (XLM).
The first instance of the attack took place this January 13th, late Saturday afternoon according to the UTC timezone. According to Kevin Beaumont, who is a security analyst, “If you had over 20 Lumens it pushes them to a different wallet.” He did the courtesy of putting down the site, by scrutinizing the code, thus saving many losses. This was before the Blackwallet team regaining their access to their DNS server.
It is estimated that around 670,000 Stellar Lumen Coins were stolen. All the coins were redirected to the attacker’s wallet making them a rich person overnight. Their wallet address is “GBH4TZYZ4IRCPO44CBOLFUHULU2WGALXTAVESQA6432MBJMABBB4GIYI”. To be exact, the hacker managed to part off with exactly 669,920 Stellar Lumen Coins. If we were to convert it into the US Dollars, it would roughly equate to $400,192. Yes, you heard it right, around half a million. This is based according to the current exchange rate between the US dollar and XLM.
While the attack took place, the Blackwallet team along with other XLM coin holder, did the courtesy of public awareness by warning other XLM owners or users. This was done via various notices on Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, the Stellar Community itself, as well as GalacticTalk forums. Even such, most people simply ignored the warning and went on to trade leading to them bearing losses because they had given away their credentials to a wrong person, courtesy the DNS redirect.
As any thief tries to cover their tracks, the hackers have also already done so. They have converted most of the currency to Bittrex, which is a cryptocurrency exchange, and it’s likely that the currency would be further converted to another crypto-currency, thus making it possible for losing track since that’s the liberty associated with crypto-currencies.
The administrators at Blackwallet are trying their level best, to try and convince Bittrex to block the hacker’s account. As per a statement from Blackwallet, this breach was possible, when someone had an unauthorized access to Blackwallet’s domain hosting provider’s account.
In a statement released earlier today, he briefed, “I am in talks with my hosting provider to get as much information about the hacker and will see what can be done with it,”
“If you ever entered your key on Blackwallet, you may want to move your funds to a new wallet using the stellar account viewer,” he added. “Please note however that Blackwallet was only an account viewer and that no keys were stored on the server!”
Currently, according to CoinMarketCap, Stellar Lumen is the eight most popular cryptocurrency.
As of now, if you were to access the site, the website would give a 404 error.