Russian Cryptocurrency exchange Livecoin is going through a tough phase recently after being targeted by hackers. The leading cryptocurrency exchange had huge profits cashed out by the hackers who managed to inflate the prices of leading cryptocurrencies and withdrew funds immediately on the inflated prices.
Following this unforeseen event of a breach, the exchange in no time posted a message on its website (only on the front-end where they still have a little control on) on Christmas Eve, warning customers not to use their services until further notice as their exchange has been hacked. It pleaded the customers to cease making any further deposits, trading, or any kinds of interactions with the exchange.
It further added that it is not sure whether any client’s funds were affected in the breach or not because the exchange handles around $50 million trade volumes daily, and in the last few hours, it rose to $805 million. So, the exchange can only assure of this once proper investigation is done into the case.
As per sources, the hackers somehow managed to control the Livecoin infrastructure and then modified the exchange rates of popular cryptocurrencies to unrealistic and inflated values. The breach is believed to have happened between December 23 & 24, and before the Livecoin admins could do anything to revive access to some of their systems, the hackers had already inflated the crypto coin prices; bitcoin price rose from a regular $23,000 to over $450,000, Ethereum price grew from $600 to $15,000, and Ripple price from $0.27 to over than $17.
The crypto exchange faced a considerable loss, but some of the victim traders are not ready to call it a breach, rather they are calling it a scam, and accusing the exchange owners of cheating them, to which Livecoin said, “this attack was carefully planned, and has been prepared, as we assume, over the last few months.”
However, they admitted in no time, having lost all control over their servers, and as they could not stop the malicious attacks on the exchange, they pleaded with customers to stop making transactions through other interfaces of the exchange like the site’s API or mobile applications. The exchange also assured its customers of having reported the case with the local law enforcement and mentioned in the website post that they are “fighting for servers, domain, and your funds, our team works around the clock.” Any update on this investigation will be informed as soon as possible by the exchange.
