In recent events, shared masternodes platform CryptoHashTank announced some of its wallets that held investors’ funds were compromised and the funds were stolen. While the coins attacked weren’t any lead ranking cryptocurrencies, CHT representatives on Discord, have respectfully asked their users for patience and vowed to restore everyone’s investments and make sure such a breach doesn’t occur again. Affected currencies at this point include ZTA, MERI, DKPC, MCT, MNPRO, P2P, GIN, MOBI, EVOS, FLEX, FTON, SINS, GRINC, Xnella, WCF, MCPC, MARC, LGS, FILOK, and PRX.
How Did the Hack Occur?
On March 17th, 2019, the team of CryptoHashTank had received a notification from their monitoring bot that all MOBI nodes had been shut down. Upon further investigation into the matter, it turned out that the wallet had been emptied. While reviewing logs and trying to determine the origin of the breach, other notifications followed, informing the team of other compromised wallets. In a desperate attempt to halt this leak, the devs worked all night to transition all other wallets to new and secure servers.
While the team has yet to announce how exactly this malicious attack took place and how their defense measures were circumvented, they’ve reassured users that they’re taking every possible step to prevent a repeat of this incident. In addition, everyone will be compensated, and their losses mitigated.
Mike, a CHT Dev on Discord said:
“We want all of you to know that we will be working all day today, until all remaining coins are positively secured and masternodes restarted. Any coins that were lost, we will do our best to recover any and all funds. This will take time! We will use all resources at our disposal to make all investors whole again!…”
Looking further into the matter, it turns out that coins were being stored in wallets running on a VPS instead of cold storage. Whether or not we should expect such a transition remains uncertain. In the mean-time, all remaining investments that are unaffected by the breach, have been moved to new wallets, re-encrypted and secured. In addition, new safety measures have been implemented to increase overall security levels.
Outcome of the Malicious Attack
After a quick reference in Crypto Bridge, assessing the results of this hack, it’s obvious that the stolen funds were immediately dumped on the market, as the respective coin prices have taken a serious hit. Based on information shared by the developers of CryptoHashTank themselves, the hackers actually sold everything through an account on Crypto Bridge. Despite efforts to request assistance in determining the origin of the attack, the CHT team has so far been denied cooperation. The official statement from the exchange is that they would require a court order to proceed any further.
Attempts are being made to expedite the investigation into who’s responsible for the attack. The CHT team has officially notified law enforcement but, in the mean-time, the focus is more so shifted towards securing any other assets on the shared masternode platform and restoring the funds of investors.