Cyber attacks have now become commonplace in the cryptocurrency world. Today we hear of attacks that cost small amounts, but in the past years there have been attacks that are worth billions of dollars in today’s value.
Big improvement in Bitfinex attack
While the tens of billions of dollars hacking of the Mt.Gox exchange is still fresh, a year or two later the Bitfinex exchange was hacked. In this attack, 119756 Bitcoins were stolen and disappeared.
The Ministry of Justice and Cybercrime Unit, which has been investigating the file for years, finally caught the attackers. Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife Heather Morgan were arrested for crimes such as cyber attack, fraud and money laundering.
In the largest operation in the history of cryptocurrencies, officials tracked the transferred BTC assets. The suspicious couple generally transferred small sums and did not touch around 94 thousand assets. Law enforcement, who had the opportunity to access critical data such as private keys with a court decision, seized this amount of $ 3.6 billion.
The suspects will be tried for 25 years. Although the concern that the seized Bitcoin amount will be sold caused some regression in the crypto money market, it has been understood that such a thing is not in question for now.
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