Bitcoin Exchange Mt.Gox Suffers Serious Attack, Instawallet Offline

Bruce66423 writes "The BBC reports that Mt.Gox, the main exchange dealing with Bitcoins, has been attacked, and other resources are off line. A scary reminder of how insecure ALL money is in the computer age..." Also at TechWeekEurope. A message at bitcoin storage service Instawallet's site begins "The Instawallet service is suspended indefinitely until we are able to develop an alternative architecture. Our database was fraudulently accessed, due to the very nature of Instawallet it is impossible to reopen the service as-is."

Comments

Old news?

[prisoner-of-enigma]

This is semi-old news. Mt.Gox has been under attack for at least a couple of days but they appear to be handling it pretty well. I haven't noticed any problems with using them at least. Trades might be taking a tad longer but nothing big that I can see.

Instawallet, on the other hand, crumbled at least a day or two (I read about it early yesterday morning). Their problem had nothing fundamental to do with BTC but more to do with the unique way Instawallet did business with (I believe) greater anonymity. The whole "we gotta rearchitect this thing" press release was that their fundamental way of doing business made them uniquely targetable by fraudsters, thus they gotta figure out something new.