Shapeshift Rebuilds After Losing $230,000, Promised to Be Back Wednesday

After a month of battling several attacks on Shapeshift’s trading platform, the company announced a full shutdown of their website to be reconstructed with improved security due to missing funds which tallied up to $230,000. The platform should be back on April 20.

Three major attacks

With the first attack on March 14, 315 BTC was stolen which resulted in ShapeShift’s decision of taking the site offline and relaunching. Two more attacks also managed to breach ShapeShift’s security and a further $124,000 was stolen.

Throughout the course of several weeks, Shapeshift experienced a total of 3 attacks which resulted in 469 BTC, 1900 LTC and 5800 ETH stolen from their hot wallets. As a result, the Shapeshift team put Shapeshift.io offline to rebuild Shapeshift’s infrastructure entirely with enhanced security protocols.

“Contact was established with the hacker, who indicated that the rogue employee from the month prior had given the hacker the information needed to carry out the attack.” wrote Shapeshift CEO, Erik Voorhees in his latest hack update.

Rogue employee

So far, Voorhees has made contact only twice with the hacker who goes under the name of Rovion Vavilov who told Voorhees how he/she managed to penetrate two of Shapeshift’s new infrastructures using purchased information that the rogue employee stole.

Voorhees stated in an April 13 update: “The story continues to unfold, and evidence continues to be revealed. We have been working with a forensic specialist from LedgerLabs, who has been terrific. A civil suit is ongoing, as are multiple criminal investigations of the perpetrators.”

As a result of these security failures, ShapeShift brought Michael Perklin, a professional forensic investigator from Ledger Labs to start a forensic audit. As well as refunds for pending orders which are being processed.

Even though the rogue employee has been identified and a civil suit opened, only some funds have been recovered. Luckily no customer funds were at risk or lost during all 3 attacks according to ShapeShift and the platform should be back on April 20.