Blockchain Reimbursing Stolen Bitcoins to Users
Hundreds of bitcoins have been stolen yesterday from Blockchain.info users made temporarily vulnerable by a technical issue during a software update of the popular Bitcoin wallet. The company has plugged the security hole, and now they are reimbursing the users who lost their bitcoins.
Also read: Blockchain.info Security Update Results in Stolen Bitcoins
“The issue was present for a brief period of time between the hours of 12:00am and 2:30am GMT on December the 8th 2014. The issue was detected quickly and immediately resolved. In total, this issue affected less than 0.0002% of our user base and was limited to a few hundred addresses. We have sent an alert to all users who have potentially vulnerable addresses in their wallets, for which we have an email on file. We are committed to working with any affected users to assess and rectify any issues.”
Company representatives said with a tweet :
“We admit we are at fault. We will be working w/affected users to reimburse those whose funds were misplaced.”
The Blockchain User Support Team is Available Seven Days a Week
Affected users can contact the official portal for Blockchain user support at https://blockchain.zendesk.com. The company says that the support team is available seven days a week to help.
Blockchain.info is an online Bitcoin wallet service that started in 2013 and rapidly became one of the most popular Bitcoin wallets.
While I have a Blockchain.info account like mostly everyone, I would never keep any substantial amount of Bitcoin funds in a web wallet. I know that nasty bugs and failures occasionally happen in any software system, and complete security is impossible to achieve in the real world. At the same time, I tend to trust companies that openly admit security problems and reach to help the affected users.
What do you think of this episode and the response of Blockchain.info? Comment below!
Images from Blockchain and Shutterstock.
