Bad news, you lovers of liberty and cryptocurrency. Somebody just hacked into the resurrected version of the Silk Road (a.k.a. Silk Road 2) and stole everybody’s money. And since that money was all in the form of Bitcoin, there’s no way to get it back.
The anonymous administrator who goes by Defcon of the black market site confirmed reports of the hack in an emotional announcement. Defcon blamed the breach on the “transaction malleability” bug in Bitcoin that actually caused some exchanges to halt the trade of the cryptocurrency earlier this week. It was an expensive breach too. According to security researcher Nicholas Weaver, the hacker stole 4474.266 BTC which is worth roughly $US2.7 million.
Some revealing — and actually pretty sad — quotes from Defcon’s announcement:
I am sweating as I write this.
This attack hit us at the worst possible time.
I have failed you as a leader, and am completely devastated by today’s discoveries.
I will fight here by your side, even the greedy bastards amongst us.
The details we have on the hacker are below. Stop at nothing to bring this person to your own definition of justice.
In case, you didn’t gather from Defcon’s words, the hacker stole not only all of the customers’ Bitcoin but also all of the marketplace’s Bitcoin. As such, Silk Road 2 will be offline for a couple days and will make some changes to how it handles transactions thereafter. Now we can all sit back and watch the Bitcoin price drop, as it does when things like this happen. [Deep Dot Web]
Picture: Flickr