A letter from the CEO of Enigma, Guy Zyskind:This is a message from Guy Zyskind, co-founder and CEO of Enigma. I am writing to address the recent attack on Enigma and its community, as well as to share a few important announcements.
As many of you know, earlier this week, a well-coordinated phishing attack was launched against our community. This attack joins a long list of other similar attacks plaguing the crypto-community, which are often targeted at high-potential token sales and crypto projects. We have addressed the vulnerabilities that the attackers exposed and are taking other measures to ensure that our community is safe and our token sale is successful. While I and the entire Enigma team, our partners, and friends from the community are all still hard at work, I need to personally share my thoughts with our community.
First, these past days have been extraordinarily challenging for everyone — for the victims of the phishing attack, for Enigma, and for our community at large. In this time, Enigma is immensely grateful for the actions of our growing community. Within minutes after the attack started, and throughout the days following the incident, our community took the lead. Good people with nothing personally to gain stood guard against new attacks, worked to shut down new scam sites, educated the community, and helped us secure ourselves. Still today, dedicated members of our community are working with us around the clock, out of their own goodwill, in an attempt to trace the scammer. These efforts have already allowed us to successfully lock some of the stolen funds.
But regardless of everyone working together and doing their best to mitigate the effects of the attack, the perpetrator was still able to steal approximately $500k in funds from some members of our community. To us as a company that values community above all, and to me personally, there’s nothing worse than having people who join our ranks with the hope of supporting the next big wave of innovation, fall victim to a malicious act. All of us at Enigma have contributed to other projects at one point in time with the hope of helping them become the next big thing. Having that privilege, as well as the substantial funds, taken away is not something that anyone should suffer — especially those that put their trust in us.
So we are taking responsibility. We are deeply sorry for the pain experienced by those who lost funds to the scam attempt, and we want to make sure that no one in our community that was a victim to this well-coordinated phishing attack is financially hurt.
We will restore funds to everyone that lost money in this recent scam attempt after our token sale concludes. We’ve already been in direct contact with some of the affected parties. If you lost funds and have not yet contacted us, please reach out to
tokensale@enigma.co with information about yourself and your transactions. We will work with our community on a case by case basis.
This week has been an important lesson to us all. We’re actively working, both internally and with experienced partners, to ensure that the token sale is secure end-to-end. Our token sale system is being deployed by Element, our friends and partners in this journey, who have already ran several high-profile token sales successfully and securely. We’ve also put in place company-wide policies regarding data sharing and password management, along with other strict security measures. Also, to remove any doubt about information shared during our token sale, we plan to live-stream our token sale on September 11. We at Enigma stand behind our project fully, and this step should go a long way in connecting our digital identities with real world identities. This way, you can be sure the sale is proceeding as expected and double check all communications.
In addition to these stringent security mechanisms, Enigma and several leading partners in the space are collaborating with an investigation led by a special cyber-crime division. We’re taking every step we believe necessary to not just recover funds but protect all future token sales from similar malicious attacks.
Despite the attack, we are very fortunate that our community and supporters continue to stand behind the Enigma project and our token sale.
As of yesterday, we have completed and closed our presale for accredited investors after reaching our $20M contribution cap. Our presale was significantly oversubscribed, and we have had to turn down additional interest in order to ensure the full participation of our community. Our attention has fully turned now to our crowdsale on September 11 as we strengthen our security and work to reopen our Slack channel.
For further updates from the Enigma team, please follow our Telegram announcement channel and our Twitter.
Thank you all again for the support you’ve shown us in these trying times. The pain that’s been caused is terrible, but I’m now more convinced than ever that with your help, we will continue to build a great project and community. Together we will create a powerful system that millions can benefit from. Let us explore new boundaries, and boldly go where no one has gone before.
Sincerely,
Guy Zyskind
Enigma Co-founder and CEO
