Another one bites the dust. CoinEx.pw seems to be the next exchange that became the victim of a successful hack. Today, CoinEx finally responded on Bitcointalk.org.
A few days ago, people started complaining in CoinEx’ official thread at the Bitcointalk forum . At first, deposits and withdrawals seemed impossible. Shortly after that, basic trading became unavailable, as well. Some time later, the exchange went into maintenance mode, linking to their Twitter account for updates. Only one tweet was made, containing ‘security issue, investigating’ as the only explanation.
The community became restless at once, thinking of several reasons as to why CoinEx could have gone into maintenance mode. A hacking attempt seemed to be the major consensus among its users, leaving everyone worried about the coins they have stacked at CoinEx.
Official updates about the matter didn’t come and the community became more worried by the hour. Some claimed Erundook, one of CoinEx’ founders, took off with all the coins himself. Obviously, this was a far-fetched conclusion but that’s what you get when you fail to make a statement whenever something major like this happens. It seems hard to learn from previous examples.
Today, three days after the site went down, Erundook finally released an update concerning the CoinEx situation. It seems the exchange was definitely a victim of a hack. The wallet server was hacked and all coins were withdrawn. Erundook said the following about this all:
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“Please stop posting FUD about CoinEx, we will issue an announcement within next 24hrs about how we are going to handle the situation.
Long story short: yes, our wallet server got hacked and all funds were withdrawn.
Please read back to the beginning of this thread, we had such a problem before and *returned all the stolen funds from our own pockets*. Before this hack happened, we also had several attacks that lost funds and we silently covered those from our fees.
For those who was stalking me at internets: that’s true, I was trying to hide/delete my accounts. At the very first moment i saw zero balance at our bitcoin wallet I knew this was coming. And it scared the shit out of me. Hope you can understand that.
About me selling bitcoins at localbitcoins.com: that’s true too. I have 33mh/s scrypt gpu mining farm, I have >50% of coinex fees + I get % from cryptostocks share sells. Nothing criminal here again.
So again, please calm down. We are not doing a runner.
The only way i can see to restore this is to sell more shares at cryptostocks to cover the losses *and to hire a professional security audit team to prevent this from happening again*.
Long story short, we’re covering this from our own pockets again.
Thanks
– erundook”
Even though the statement was made too late, it still explains most questions that were posed by the community. Whether CoinEx will be able to recover all lost funds from their own pockets, remains to be seen. Selling shares may be a solution, but the community will only ease once they have definite proof that all coins are restored to the right users. To be continued!
We will keep an eye on this issue and provide updates when more news is available.
