The theft of bitcoins seems to be increasingly frequent, in this opportunity about 70 million dollars were stolen from the NiceHash web portal, a page dedicated to perform cryptocurrency mining operations.
The cybercriminals came to take the amount of 4700 bitcoins, which at the current price of the currency is at least 60 million dollars (the figure may increase or decrease depending on the price recorded by the bitcoin). Representatives of NiceHash spoke with Reuters and described the incident as a very professional move, because they used quite sophisticated techniques. For now the operations on the website are suspended.
NiceHash offers within its services the possibility of buying or renting processing power to extract new cryptocurrencies. The first service drop occurred yesterday, and the suspension went on until noon. At the time, NiceHash reported that they had observed an unusual activity and two hours later a user reported that a transaction could not be completed.
When NiceHash made the first announcement of the theft they emphasized that they did not know the amount that had been stolen, but not long after CoinDesk announced that they had stolen 4736, 42 Bitcoins.
Some users reported that a bitcoin portfolio whose balance went from 0.01 bitcoins, ie USD $ 123 to 4665, 25 bitcoins, that is 57.7 million dollars thanks to more than 3000 transactions made in 10 minutes.