Major altcoin exchange Mintpal has been hacked and an undisclosed amount of VeriCoin has been taken from the exchange. According to a statement posted on the exchange's official blog, the company is working with VeriCoin developers to fork the blockchain and recover the funds. At this time, the exchange is no longer processing VeriCoin withdraws.
All other coins can still be withdrawn from the exchange. Mintpal stresses that VeriCoin's network itself is secure and wasn't the cause of the attack. Instead, Mintpal admits that it was its own security that was compromised and seems to imply, but not specifically state, that other coins were unaffected.
A notice about the attack on the exchange's home page
VeriCoin currently has a market cap of USD $6.3 Million, or 10,015 BTC. According to Mintpal's security page they “store the majority of our customer's funds in a secure offline wallet” which would imply that the majority of the VeriCoin is safe from hacking. We will see in the coming weeks how inline the reality of their storage techniques are with their policy. You can read Mintpal's post below and on the exchange's official blog.
We will have more as information becomes available.
“Please read the entirety of this post.
A few hours ago we were unfortunately the subject of a successful attack against the exchange. Our investigations have shown that whilst our security was breached, VeriCoin was the target. We would like to stress that VeriCoin and the VeriCoin network has not been in any way compromised. We have worked to secure the exchange and the withdraw process from any further attack.
As it stands at the moment the following applies:
1) We lost a considerable amount of VeriCoin in the attack, however we have been working with the VRC developers and all major exchanges to hard fork the coin at a position before the attack. This will allow us to retrieve the stolen coins and facilitate all withdrawals. We are also working with various exchanges to accommodate any losses they may encouter as a result of the required fork.
2) We are currently processing withdrawals for all other coins.
As I'm sure you will appreciate, our support channels will most likely be very busy over the coming hours/days so please bear with us.
We would like to personally extend our thanks to the VeriCoin developers and the other exchanges who have pulled out all of the stops to ensure that your VRC funds are safe.”