Bitker Exchange Announces Closure After Revealing Cyber Attack
Earlier today, Singapore based cryptocurrency exchange, Bitker, used one of their Telegram channels to announce that they had been hacked and were ceasing operations effective immediately. The post confirms that the hack had taken place back in May this year, but it is not yet clear how much was stolen and what the impact will be for exchange users. This is the announcement in full:
Outage Announcement
Dear BITKER users:
Thank you for your long-term support to BITKER!
Due to various uncontrollable factors, BITKER will be terminated at 23:59:59 on September 2nd, 2019 (GMT+8). The announcement to the public is as follows:
In the perspective of freedom, justice and honesty, BITKER was unfortunately hacked on May 28th, 2019. Even though we have tried our best to carry out a three-month remedial work, we are very sorry that it resulted in a huge loss, which we can’t afford. In the end, we have got to close BITKER and we are very sorry about this.
We are sincerely regretful and apologize for the all the inconvenience to our users because of Bitker’s termination of operation.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation again.
BITKER
2019.09.02
The exchange, which was regularly reported to be in the world’s top 20 by volume, had recently just celebrated it’s 1st birthday and had opened several new trading pairs during August. However, many users have reported problems withdrawing funds for a number of months. One company, MaidSafe, even took the step of informing their community that they had lost confidence in the exchange and could no longer recommend it to their users.
What will annoy and frustrate many Bitker users, and the wider crypto community, is the approach taken by the exchange upon finding they had been targetted. Taking in excess of three months to inform users is clearly questionable and it seems that without even a pinch of irony that they cite “…freedom, justice and honesty…” within today’s announcement.
Users will now be hoping for much greater transparency from the exchange as they try to understand exactly what happened, how much was taken, what progress has been made to catch those responsible and if any refunds will take place.
Disclaimer: I‘m a former MaidSafe employee.
