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BitFloor Joins List of Compromised BitCoin Exchanges
hypnosec writes "An attacker managed to access an unencrypted backup of wallet keys and steal 24,000 BTC (worth more than a quarter million USD), following which Bitcoin exchange Bitfloor has been shut down while the investigation of the theft is going on. The attack was carried out sometime last night. In a forum post, Shtylman pleads with Bitcoin users that BitFloor needs their help."
I'm not really surprised by this. Someone had the idea to create a purely virtual currency, and someone else has found it to be an attractive target.
The fact that it is vulnerable to this kind of attack probably indicates there's some real flaws in how this currency is supposed to work -- or at least a few places where someone can get through the cracks.
I remember when I first started hearing about this, and thinking "gee, I hope they've thought through all of the security issues". It's like security in operating systems ... there's tons of things you could overlook which can let someone in, and until it starts happening, you likely haven't even thought of all of them.
I feel bad for anybody has lost their money on this, but I've been treating this like an experiment which has the potential to go really wrong. It's just so massively complex to try to design your own currency system that someone isn't going to try to exploit without going through a lot of growing pains.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Easy way to make money, set up a bitcoin exchange, run it long enough to get a couple 100 grand of bitcoins then steal them all from yourself, since bitcoin is untraceable there's really no way to get caught.
Why the fuck was your backup of keys stored umencrypred? It costs only a vew cpu cycles.
This smacks of an inside job, which given the nature of bitcoin, is far to easy.
Set up exchange, collect keys, lose keys in 'compromise', profit. No ???? Needed.
Silence is a state of mime.
People in places that Americans frequently view as backward and primative have had this figured out for a long time
Obviously, there's lots of ways things could go wrong, but I'd give them my money before I'd put it in a bitcoin exchange...
The title of your post is spot on: you really don't get it.
The amount of black money in the EU is well over 1000 billion euro. Try to picture that much money. Now imagine the corrupt Chinese official who was caught stacking piles of money inside his walls at home because he didn't know how to spend it. Understand that the communist party in China has over 70 million members, many of them an official of some sort. Now think about all the other corrupt places in the world.
I think you get the idea. There's a ton of people who want to do business outside of official channels. Occasionally losing some money in an exchange that gets hacked is better than having your money rot inside a wall.