Cryptopia Exchange Hacked, Kiwi Authorities Begin Investigation

Beginning 13 January, customers of Cryptopia’s cryptocurrency exchange based in New Zealand began to experience technical issues with their trading accounts.

The exchange announced on Twitter that they had carried out an unplanned maintenance work to solve the problem.

Initially, it looked as if there were technical issues. However, as time passed traders and investors understood that the problem is quite serious.

The initial Cryptopia tweet is provided below.

Tweets informing about maintenance by Cryptopia

The above displayed tweet was followed by two more tweets from the cryptocurrency exchange confirming that they are still involved in unplanned maintenance. Those two tweets are provided below.

Visitors to the website of Cyrptopia exchange also witnessed the following message about unscheduled maintenance.

“Cryptopia is currently in unscheduled maintenance mode. We will be back soon. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, we are working to resume services as quickly as possible.”

Cryptopia confirms Security Breach

As a continuation to the above tweets, the exchange has posted another tweet that reveals the extent of damage suffered by a security breach. The Cryptopia team also notified its customers that all applicable government legal agencies in New Zealand had been informed.

The crypto platform was attacked on 14 January per the tweet. Both trading and funds transfer in and out of the Cryptopia exchange has been temporarily suspended. The exchange did not divulge any other information as of writing this article. An elaborate message posted by the exchange on Twitter is provided below for readers’ reference.

In general, any news of security breach receives negative response from cryptocurrency market. This might be of concern to traders and investors as the market is already weak and lacks formidable buying support. As of now, majority of altcoins are trading with a loss of between 0.1% and 0.5%. Bitcoin (BTC) has lost 0.1% today to trade at $3,613 levels. It may take at least 24 hours for the Cryptopia team to assess the extent of financial loss, which may decide the short-term trend of the overall cryptocurrency market.