Less than a year after Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox suffered a major meltdown following reports of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the currency, a new hack seems to have hit another Bitcoin exchange.
UK- and Slovenia-based Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp revealed Monday (Jan. 5) that it has gone offline due to a possible data breach.
“We have reason to believe that one of Bitstamp’s operational wallets was compromised on January 4th, 2015,” the exchange’s website said as of Monday afternoon. Bitstamp is advising against making Bitcoin deposits at previously issued deposit addresses as they will not be honored. All users’ accounts are now frozen as the company probes the situation.
Bitstamp has remained mum on details of the potential security failings, but its customers shouldn’t panic, reports say, as Bitstamp assured that only its “operational wallet” was compromised, involving only a fraction of the currency bought and sold. And in the world of Bitcoin, Bitstamp only accounts for about 6 percent of all transactions across the globe, according to Bitcoin Charts statistics.
While the alleged security breach may not be devastating to Bitstamp, Bitcoin as a whole could be on the fritz; 2014 proved to be a wild year for the cryptocurrency, though experts say Bitcoin could rise in 2015 as oil prices drop across the globe.
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