BTCJam is a peer-to-peer bitcoin lending platform that has seen some successful bitcoin businesses born from its womb.
Last night, reports started surfacing on Reddit that the site had gone down and immediately previous to that, some users saw their accounts emptied. The site has since been restored and the CEO has stated emphatically that no users will lose their coins. The CEO also has not confirmed this as a hack, noting only that they noticed some “invalid transactions[.]” He also stated that BTCJam keeps the vast majority of their holdings in cold storage.
BTCJam seems like an odd place for a hacker to attack. As a peer-to-peer lending platform, the amount of Bitcoins they need to keep online is far lower than the amount typically held by services like exchanges. BTCJam users are either borrowing or lending money, so there is very little reason for its users to keep significant funds in BTCJam for very long (just while looking for someone to lend it to).
Perhaps the hackers thought it would be lower hanging fruit because the lower Bitcoin total might result in lesser security. BTCJam was hacked before, although users with 2fa (two factor authentification) enabled were not affected.
Whatever the reasoning behind the hacker(s) attacking BTCJam, if it was a hack at all, the site has been restored and everything seems to be progressing as normal. This, in fact, could be one of the quickest responses and revivals after a hack that we have seen in the Bitcoin community, again if a hack is what happened.
We are offline to resolve some technical issues with logging in. We would like to assure you that no Bitcions were lost in this process.
— BTCJam (@btcjam) August 10, 2014
BTCJam hasn't spoken much about incident outside of the Reddit thread and a Twitter post. With things returning to normal, we will have to wait and see if they feel there is any more comment necessary. We have reached out to BTCJam and will update this page as necessary.
Did you enjoy this article? You may also be interested in reading these ones:
Help Cointelegraph tell the World Health Organization to accept bitcoin to fight Ebola!
They have no reason not to take it!