A third of the stolen REP from the account of Bo Shen has been recovered according to Augur Co-Founder Jack Peterson, and he thinks more of the stolen tokens could still be retrieved as they continue to work with exchanges.
An account belonging to Shen, one of the early investors in Ethereum and Augur, was reportedly hacked last Tuesday causing the Poloniex Augur market to bottom at the price level of 0.0001 BTC for one REP, despite the average price of 0.0035 in the previous period.
Most stolen REP swapped to BTC, but @Changelly_team has restored over 1/3 of the BTC to @boshen1011. Very grateful for their honesty! #augur
— Jack Peterson (@tensorjack) December 9, 2016
The hacked wallet was a top 20 wallet by size in Augur and constituted a significant percent of the total token supply.
Though Shen is not Augur, Peterson has suggested ways account users could forestall such a hack in the future. He says to Cointelegraph:
“As with all cryptos, Augur's user account security is, for better or worse, up to the user. About all we can do is give advice, and it's the same stuff you always hear: Use hardware wallets and/or air-gapped computers. Don't store your cryptos on exchanges. For mobile security specifically, the best advice I've seen is this blog post from Kraken.”
While BitClub’s Joby Weeks recently said he lost over 100 Bitcoins to a hacker that gained unauthorized access to his accounts through his phone, citing that AT&T started forwarding his 2FA codes which enabled the hacker to get access to his accounts, Peterson thinks differently. He says:
“One small thing I'd add is that, anecdotally, AT&T is supposedly the most secure US cell phone carrier; Verizon and T-Mobile have a reputation for relatively poor security. Also, there are sites like https://www.leakedsource.com where you can look up whether your info is in the leaked databases of previously-hacked websites. If any of your accounts show up there, then at a minimum you should change the passwords on those accounts!”
A REP is now worth 0.003970 BTC on Poloniex as at the time of this publication.