$13.5 million worth of cryptocurrency stolen in Bancor security breach

Token creation platform Bancor has gone offline after a security breach on Monday led to the platform losing millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.

The platform announced on Twitter that it would go offline and that it is looking "forward to being back online as soon as possible."

This morning (CEST) Bancor experienced a security breach. No user wallets were compromised. To complete the investigation, we have moved to maintenance and will be releasing a more detailed report shortly. We look forward to being back online as soon as possible.

— Bancor (@Bancor) July 9, 2018

"To complete the investigation, we have moved to maintenance and will be releasing a more detailed report shortly," the tweet added.

It also confirmed that no user wallets were compromised.

According to a report by Coindesk, Bancor’s head of communications Nate Hindman said that the team had been successful in blocking the estimated transfer of 2.5 million BNT tokens (around additional $10 million). However, it had failed to do so for around 25,000 ETH (about $12.5 million) and almost 230 million NPXS tokens (worth approximately $1 million total).

"We were able to freeze the stolen BNT, limiting the damage to the Bancor ecosystem from the theft. The ability to freeze tokens was built into the Bancor Protocol to be used in an extreme situation to recover from a security breach, allowing Bancor to effectively stop the thief from running away with the stolen tokens," Hindman said, according to the report.

"It is not possible to freeze the ETH or any other stolen tokens. However, we are now working with dozens of cryptocurrency exchanges to trace the stolen funds and make it more difficult for the thief to liquidate them," Hindman added.

According to Hindman, the company has "identified the cause of the breach and removed the vulnerability," adding that "We expect Bancor to go back online in the next 24 hours. We will continue to post updates as and when appropriate on our Telegram channel and on Twitter."