Bitcoin Forum

Learning about today's NiceHash hack I can't stop wondering how come they had nearly 5000 BTC for god sake? Have thousands of miners not withdrew for years? Have large players kept lots of funds to quickly grab mining power at will?

You have to remember that they most likely had 10.000's of miners and many most likely did not withdrew right away. Personally I only had value of around 100 USD on the account, but some might just have used the nicehash wallet as their main wallet, if they only did mining via nicehash.

The biggest issue however is most likely that those who purchased hashing power, would have had a lot of coins in their wallets.

Sorry for your lost funds m8. I hope hackers will return most of the funds in exchange for some % so NiceHash won't be completely destroyed by this....

Let's hope so

Yap, many small miners with 1 GPU or even CPU used them for months or even years without reaching minimum payout. Now all these people lost their money. Another example how not to keep your money on any kind of online system or exchange.

I think it's an inside job, anyone here watched their live stream and about the hacking incident? When they are about to say about those funds that are still on their miners balance, I don't know who that guy is but he showed a sigh. I don't know those people that still have their bitcoins on their wallet if they will be refunded but I don't think so that they will do it but still I hope they can recover from this tragedy.

About which NiceHash livestream are you talking about? When did that happen?

They did a livestream a few hours ago at Facebook talking about the incident and what happened.

According to them, the hackers were able to log in using one of the NiceHash engineers accounts and simulate a withdraw. Here it is:
https://www.facebook.com/NiceHash/videos/2013146182237851/

Yeah, I was never a fan of their "wallet" system. It had stupid fees, and encouraged users to keep larger than normal balances on the site, which is why they held so much. Also, not everything was from mining, many users had money on there that they were using to buy hashpower. They were a "hashpower exchange" after all.

Yes that was the link given by tryninja and it happened at 4 PM ET.
I think it is not hacking, it is just a plain stealing of their funds with the help of their engineer and it has a history of hacking too. But it's better to say that they were hacked and others are thinking that it was just a mere exit scam.

The issue here is not about one person or group of people having that amount of btc in the custody of NiceHash and its not that they are not withdrawing but its like everyone of us on the forum having as low as 0.001btc on a particular site. As at the last check which I did, we have above 500,000 members on the average taking into consideration the amount of people that have several accounts imagine the amount of btc that would have been siphoned in case the site gets compromised, that's exactly what happened here.

Miners are smart to know that you don't leave large chunk of your funds on a site but hackers are equally smarter looking for who to devour at every opportunity its left for us to protect ourselves from the ones we can and be exposed to the minimum casualties to the ones we cannot control.

That was honestly worst "sorry" live stream I have ever seen. Also what they say about attack vector either demonstrate how unprofessional they are with security or they are not telling the whole story. I believe in any circumstances honesty would be the best policy.

Im not really convinced at all on their explanation on why they are being hacked and i do presume that this do have somehow a mix of inside job where they do just show out that it is really an accident. They are really just showing to the public that they arent really ready on these kind of situations on where they are really prone to hacking. Im wondering how those engineers accounts being known and been compromised assuming that they do really know the risk if somehow do have the access on those things.

They have ten thousand miners I guess since they are for the mine = bitcoins for no hassle of getting bitcoins.
I'm not convinced too since the other guy sitting is one that has a case of hacking too.

I think there was no need for stealing money because profit would be nice with current price but at the same time maybe it was hard them to be trustworthy when bitcoin's price is so much. Who cares if nicehash was hacked or burned? Their users need money, every bitcoin related service and wallet losts interest in people because finally everyone makes scam/hack exit.

Hacking is the biggest risk in getting involved in crypto, imho. We have to be extra careful where we trade, store our wallet, passwords, etc. Frankly speaking in today's world everyone can get hacked, from governments, crypto or actual banks, but the incentives are much higher when you can make an immoral profit like in this case and you can't be tracked. This is also another reason why a lot of investors steers clear from crypto, because it attracts bad people!

Well first of all, how come the engineer has the access to the main wallet? The engineer shouldn't have an access to the wallet and also, about the streaming i wasn't convinced their explanation about the hack and i believe this hack is an inside job and if the hack were done outside, the site owners and webmasters will detect this and stop this hack immediately. Now i feel sorry for who bought cloud mining to their site and purchase large mining powers

In terms of sites and services, it's not hacking, but inside jobs being the biggest risk factor. In current time and day it's easy to perform an inside job and blame hackers for exploiting a security hole in their platform.

Fact of the matter is that services shouldn't have that many coins sitting in hot wallets. Especially, in case of NiceHash, there is nothing in the world that justifies them to store that many coins in a hot wallet.

It's either done on purposely, which I believe is the case, or done because of their stupidity and incompetence. It must have felt very warm considering them being responsible for taking care of that many coins.

Even so warm, that they believe that they can just take it at cost of all the people having been totally dedicated to that platform. It's again a costly lesson for people that (when possible) withdrawing funds is always a necessity.

Of course NH knew the risks and of course they had offline cold wallet to store funds.
No way this is simple negligence or (as they say) "phished engineer's password".

The only logical explanation is that someone who had access to their cold storage (someone who knew private key or had access to it) took the funds or gave private key to someone who took the funds.

It is impossible to believe that professionally made and widely appropriated service as NH was dumb enough to store ALL THEIR BTC assets on hot wallet, giving access to it left and right to IT illiterates. If they was THAT stupid this would have happened long ago.

I think the majority of it was people who rented out the hashrates. I could see having a miner going and just leaving the coins there if you weren't going to spend them. I don't think people who rented the hashrate really lost a whole lot. Still sucks either way it goes though as there was like $85million stolen.

Wow. I just heard about this. So glad I hit minimum payout (non nicehash wallet) and cashed out before this. Haven't actually mined since I cashed out so I lose nothing I guess, but that sucks for people who did.

It is not impossible, though negligence on their part when there are provisions for safe storage I.e cold wallet storage.

Again if the money was gathered by fraud, it will go same way also. Let everyone be careful how to gather your money.

NH is into mining also? For how long are in this that the admin became unaware of cyber crime in Crypto world?
What a loss! How about investors capital? How are they going to manage the risk.

I wish I had details of the incident, I will fish out the hackers on the spot of the incident. I can try something IF I can get accurate info.

Inform me of any hack on your wallet and I will recover it for you.

Kenapa Anda memakai profil saya!!!⅝

Lulz - either the NH people are morons and let someone steal $90million dollars, or they stole it themselves.
Which do you think is the most likely?

Here's a bunch of unknown guys, with shady backgrounds, with a wallet of $90million dollars and it disappears ... ... ... ...
In my opinion they should go to jail for robbery or negligence - the amount of $ isn't all that much less than MtGox ...

I've never been a fan of them or trusted them, in fact I've posted about issues with them on occasion that they always ignored.

To be blunt, it's not unexpected either from this band of hackers.
Their changes to the mining software is a security risk to all miners that use it ... as I have stated clearly in the past ... but people just ignore it ...
People see money and will do anything stupid to get it.

Oh well.

That's how things go here. Funny thing is that they don't even consider it to be stupid or high risk. If we have to believe them, it's a well thought out investment plan to obtain a stream of passive income.

I think it's save to say that the hunt for passive income is what makes people go for nonsense like this. They completely ignore the variables involved in mining, just for the idea to make money without doing anything.

Instead of them earning money without doing anything, they are constantly losing money without doing anything. Mining is just a wasted part of the investment aspect, but people still need to catch up on that.