An interesting news story involving recently hacked Bitcoin exchange BTER was released earlier today. According to the BTER Twitter account, the team is planning on reopening the exchange to its full potential once again. This story draws a lot of parallels to what happened to that other major Bitcoin exchange that got hacked earlier this year, which led to Bitstamp having to rebuild their entire backend as well.
BTER : Funds Stolen, Customers Still Not Repaid In Full
2015 Has definitely not been the year of Bitcoin exchanges so far, with multiple platforms suffering from DDoS attacks, and in some cases, even a breach of security which resulted in customer funds being lost. Two major exchanges have suffered from that same fate over the course of January and February, as both Bitstamp and BTER have lost Bitcoins due to these security breaches.
In the case of BTER, over 7,000 Bitcoins were lost, which put a major damper on the mood among Bitcoin community members. Not just because of that rather large amount of coins gone missing, but also because the BTER hack came on the heels of the Bitstamp hack and the exchange opening its doors to the public once again at the end of January.
According to various crypto sources, the BTER exchange had insufficient funds to repay all of the customer who have lost money. In fact, things were looking so dire that a contingency plan had been formed by BTER executives in order to sell the exchange platform if push would come to shove. Up until this point, there has been no official confirmation of this plan being executed though.
The fact that it wasn’t the first time the BTER exchange platform got hacked didn’t help matters either. Just six months prior to the recent hack, the exchange platform had been breached by a hacker who managed to sluice away 50 million NXT – worth around US$1.6m at the time of the attack. A portion of that funds was returned to the exchange platform after successful negotiations with the hacker however.
Needless to say, there seems to be something wrong with the BTER exchange platform’s security, and this issue needs to be addressed as soon as possible. Getting hacked once can happen to the very best, but twice in six months is a sign on the wall to move away from BTER and look for a different exchange to satisfy your trading needs.
Rebuilding the BTER Backend and Resume Trading
A few hours ago, the BTER Twitter account mentioned the following: “We have decided to rebuild BTER’s backend, completely solve the wallets security issue and re-enable all the tradings.” It’s about time their engineers start working on ways to completely solve the security issues concerning the BTER exchange platform, which is something that should have been done six months ago.
Unfortunately, no official ETA was given and it remains to be seen how long the rebuilding process will take. If BTER engineers take a page from BitStamp’s book, it will take about a week and a half from this announcement until the exchange is up and running again. It is important to note however that users can currently access the BTER website, but certain trading options have been disabled for the time being.
This announcement also brings a lot of controversy to the table, as there is still no word on when affected customers will see their stolen coins being returned to them, either by the hacker or by BTER themselves. It looks like the exchange platform is doing everything they can to move people’s attention away from the fact they can’t repay their customer base at this point.
Will you be using the BTER exchange platform again once it’s fully operational? Let us know in the comments below1
Source : https://twitter.com/btercom/status/572372272536662017
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