New Silk Road hit with $2.6 million heist due to known Bitcoin flaw

Cornering the Bitcoin market may be easier than cornering orange juice futures.

Paramount Pictures / Aurich Lawson

Not only are Bitcoin trading sites like Bitstamp and Mt. Gox susceptible to the recent accleration of the "transaction malleability" problem, but apparently the Silk Road—or at least its newest incarnation—is too.

On Thursday "Defcon," one of the anonymous administrators of the Silk Road, declared ominously: "We have been hacked." (The message was later reposted in full to reddit.)

According to rough estimates by Nicholas Weaver, a computer security researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, the exploit has resulted in the site losing approximately 4,400 bitcoins, presently worth around $2.6 million, that were taken from Silk Road’s escrow account.