Pierluigi Paganini August 14, 2016

Bitfinex exchange is willing to offer 5% of the lost funds (nearly 6,000 BTC) as a reward for the recovery of the stolen bitcoins.

Early August, the Bitcoin plunged just over 20% after news of the security breach suffered by Bitfinex that led the theft of 120,000 Bitcoin.

Last week the company announced a reward of $3.5 Million (Nearly 5% of the lost 6,000 BTC) to anyone who can provide information that allows it to recover the stolen Bitcoins.

Now, the exchange is willing to offer 5% of the lost funds (nearly 6,000 BTC) as a reward for the recovery of the stolen bitcoins.

The someguy916 Reddit user requested info about the availability of a reward for the stolen bitcoins, and the Bitfinex community director Zane Tackett confirmed the intention of the company in awarding the support that can lead the recovery of the stolen Bitcoins.

“5% of recovery and for information leading to recovery (but no bounty if no recovery); if multiple persons lead to recovery, share pro rata,” said Tackett wrote.

At the time of the attack, the company did not provide further information on the security breach. The Bitfinex spokesman Zane Tackett wrote on Reddit that its platform implements several security mechanisms, but evidently the hackers have found a hole to bypass them, for example, the crooks overwhelmed the  limits in place to prevent hackers from draining wallets

Tackett also excluded the involvement of insiders.

“There were a number of security practices that were in place to make this the most secure, yet transparent way of securing funds and we used the company that prides itself and specializes in bitcoin storage. How these practices were bypassed, we’re still investigating.” wrote Tackett. “We did have limits in place to prevent against attacks draining our wallets. We’re still investigating how the attacker was able to circumvent these limits.”

On Wednesday Bitfinex announced it has implemented additional security measures to protect its customers:

“We have added additional platform and infrastructure security checks; regenerated all encrypted services, including wallets, security tokens, and passwords; moved funds to multisig cold storage; re-evaluated all third-party integrations; performed a comprehensive system audit in order to identify vulnerabilities; and, rebuilt our entire platform on new infrastructure.”

Unfortunately, this kind of incidents is not unusual, similar security breach already occurred in the past, and likely will happen again in the future.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Bitfinex, Hacking)