A company billing itself as one of Europe's biggest Bitcoin exchanges said it suffered a coordinated attack that succeeded in stealing almost $1 million worth of the digital currency, marking the latest in a string of high-stakes heists hitting companies that hold large sums online.
Kris Henriksen, CEO of Denmark-based Bitcoin Internet Payment Services (BIPS), made that claim last week in a Web post that said the attack began as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Two days later, Henriksen said, the same attackers targeted the BIPS network again and managed to use the damage they previously inflicted to somehow tamper with the channel that connects BIPS data storage systems to company servers.
"On November 15, BIPS was the target of a massive DDoS attack, which is now believed to have been the initial preparation for a subsequent attack on November 17 that overloaded our managed switches and disconnected the iSCSI connection to the SAN on BIPS servers," the CEO wrote. "Regrettably, despite several layers of protection, the attack caused vulnerability to the system, which has then enabled the attacker/s to gain access and compromise several wallets."
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