A hacker has managed to break into the administrator panel for customers of cloudhoster Linode. From there, the attacker then very specifically the virtual Bitcoin wallets of eight customers of the hosting company to be plundered.
Linode, a hosting company that cloudservers rents out to businesses and developers in a similar way as Amazon does with its Elastic Cloud offering, and Rackspace with its cloudservers, confirms that an attacker Thursday morning access has managed to get to the administration of eight customers. All of these customers were in one way or another engaged with the virtual betaaleenheid bitcoins, making it plausible that this was a very targeted attack.
It is not known how the attacker has managed to get, but it is probably abused a vulnerability in the management environment. “The suspicious actions are noted and formed the basis for an investigation,” said Linode in the statement. Also, the attacker at that time, the access to the systems is denied. Linode stresses that there through the portal where the hacker has had access had no access to credit card information or passwords can be obtained.
Research by Ars Technica has revealed that the attacker, for a total of at least 228.000 dollars to bitcoins has captured. Bitcoin is a cryptographic money, with which payments can be carried out by means of a p2p distributed database. In 2009, it established the payment system works entirely in a decentralised manner, in which the amount of currencies by a fixed pattern to be released.
The makers claim that Bitcoin, by its structure, not by governments or banks can be manipulated. Nevertheless, the digital wallets where Bitcoins are stored just like normal purses, are captured. This kind of theft happens more often, both via malware, as well as via the ‘old-fashioned’ hacks. That would mainly be caused by the Bitcoins in particular, at the beginning of last year more and more worth, with a peak at 30 dollars for one Bitcoin.
After a hack in mid-last year decreased the value of the virtual currency at a rapid pace to less than $ 3. At the time of writing, the exchange rate of a Bitcoin is about 4.5 Us dollars.