Steemit Hacked for $85,000 dollars

Social media site Steemit, just a week after giving away $1.3 million USD to users after seeing huge success, has temporarily shut down after a major hack.

The number of affected accounts is around 260. Bittrex, Steemit’s partner exchange, also halted orders of the platform’s currency.

site-4The cause of the hack has not been made public. However, complaints from the Steemit’s Slack chat point to a lack of security features, specifically two-factor authentication, frustrating users.

“A lot of chat traffic is going on in the Steemit slack of accounts being hacked,” one Steemit user wrote in a post earlier today. “Maybe It’s time for my newest proposal. Two factor authentication! I think that with a simple configuration of the Google Authenticator app you can secure your account a whole lot better!”

The alarm was seemingly sounded by users such as Hive account@dragonslayer109 who uploaded screenshots of unauthorized transactions seemingly being made on their account. The user claimed that over $300 had been drained.

Refund for users

Bittrex, on their part, temporarily suspended deposit and withdrawal of Steem and Steem Dollars at their exchange.

Steem has asked its users to contact their support team at contact@steemit.com if their account was not created through facebook or reddit.

For the users that used their social networking Ids to create the account, they will be able to login using the same credentials they originally used within 48 hours.

It is expected that most users will be able to regain full access to accounts and funds. Steem it is advising their users to reset account passwords. Ned Scott in his communique has assured users again that “Any Steem or Steem Dollars stolen from compromised accounts will be fully refunded by Steemit.”