The Hack – The Resolution
Posted by AllCrypt Staff on March 25, 2014
I’m happy to report that we have recovered 55,685.92170221 BTCS that were stolen on Friday the 21st. And can now relate the rest of the story.
Shortly after we posted the first blog entry including the address the BTCS was withdrawn to, we were contacted by Jay of MintPal via twitter (tweet since deleted, I think to keep the info quiet) and submitted a ticket on our support system. He told us that he saw the blog post and out of curiosity, he checked their system. The address the coins were sent to was a MintPal address. The users account was locked down pending investigation.
Emails flew back and forth. Apparently the thief claimed that he did a normal withdrawal from his AllCrypt.com account and didn’t know why we were picking on him. MintPal wanted to be thorough and make sure my story was true and that he wasn’t accidentally screwing up his own user’s account.
AllCrypt provided logs, and we verified IP addresses and email addresses used by the thief. MintPal confirmed it was the same on their site. We signed messages using the sending BTCS addresses in question to verify we owned the address the coins came from. The thief said that he could prove that it was a valid transfer. How, I’ve no idea, because the coins were stolen from three different accounts. He was given a deadline which came and went.
In the meantime, AllCrypt.com relaunched. We were contacted on Sunday by a user who claimed to have found a vulnerability in our system (here’s the vulnerability he found: If you append garbage to the market?id= string on the market pages, some of that data appears in the backto= link that is used to send you back to the page you were on after logging in. HTML tags are stripped and all funny characters are escaped, so do it all you want – it just makes a broken link. Actually – don’t. You’re going to eventually type something that gets your IP banned).
Anyway, assuming it to be someone trying to be helpful and them not realizing we increased our security, I replied and told him that it’s a non issue.
He then said that we should reward him. What? No. I told him to piss off. He then threatened to sell the information to “other russians” and proceeded to try to extort a “reward”. Then to prove his point that he “found data” he quoted something he “just found” – information that no longer existed. Stuff he saw on Friday when he hacked the site. Stuff that, while we were down, we changed, renamed, moved, and tightened security on. In other words – on Sunday when we relaunched, the information did not exist anymore. So the only way he could have seen it was to have seen it Friday. The asshole came back and was now trying extortion.
The thief told the MintPal devs that the coins had come from a BTCS address here at AllCrypt. In fact, the address is attached to the account the thief made here. And that account had never received or sent a single coin. Apparently, the guy is an imbecile and is too stupid to realize that’s a simple check (Oh, yes, I am intentionally being inflammatory).
More emails between us and MintPal, and the devs over there became convinced he was the thief. They returned what was left that the thief had not already moved out of MintPal -55,685.92170221 BTCS.
We want to thank Jay and Jason at MintPal for their honesty and integrity in helping resolve this situation. They went above and beyond (including enduring my barrage of harassing emails while their servers were experiencing issues – a fact I was not aware of while I was pestering them) in helping bring this to a positive resolution. Unfortunately, due to laws in the country they operate (I honestly don’t know where they are based) they could not divulge information they have on the thief.
I, however, could give a rats ass about that.
The IP addresses he accessed AllCrypt.com from:
212.83.157.140
212.7.218.136
109.202.157.143
94.23.191.244
184.170.137.139
The email address he used both here and at MintPal:
jennerjens04@gmail.comAnother email address used here:
anon7318@gmail.comThe BTC addresses where he attempted to withdraw BTC to but was unsuccessful:
1QKJDJSGz24JFY3rKiv6b9SKuRMLD4nZN2
1HZ8m5vQpJ6RT6vceuCCSQDwzWPvh4nNAE
All other withdrawals were to MintPal addresses so it would be pointless to track anything there.
If anyone finds anything out on this guy we’d love to know.
The coins will be proportionally distributed to the three who lost them.
Again – Jay and Jason over at MintPal – class acts. If only all exchange devs were as open and had as much integrity as they do. Of course we are competitors, both being crypto exchanges, but it’s nice to see us being able to work together for the common good. I can end a horrible day (personal reasons) with a smile on my face.
Thanks all.
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With the exception of the unnecessary curse words, this info needs to be well documented not just a reference link
It's time you guys get a company wide security audit, there may be more vulnerabilities you need to address.
