Bitcoin Firm Coinapult Recovers from Hacking Incident

Following a hacking incident last month, bitcoin firm Coinapult was able to restore its services and is back online. The payment processing company implemented a series of security improvements designed to prevent further outages.

Coinapult users can now lock and unlock their deposits with the bitcoin firm to fiat currencies or assets. The hacking incident, which occurred mid-March, prompted the firm to halt its operations and make the announcement via Twitter.

Bitcoin Firm Security Upgrades

The bitcoin firm attack resulted to a loss of 150 BTC, which was approximately equal to $43,000 then.Coinapult COO and CFO Justin Blincoe clarified that customer deposits were not affected and that the hack was aimed at the company’s hot wallet, which stored its own funds.

With that, the bitcoin firm decided to encode multi-signature security, which means that every withdrawal must now be cosigned by a Coinapult executive. “This manual cosigning is an extremely safe method of operation, but will result in delays making withdrawals. Our team will only be cosigning transactions during the hours of 9am-9pm in Panama (UTC−5),” according to Coinapult’s blog post.

The post also indicated that it was prioritizing moving to a client-side signing system and that the company is working hard to restore instant withdrawals. However, Coinapult was still unable to identify the specific entry point of the hacking attack.

In any case, Coinapult decided to move to new servers and a new hosting location. Aside from that, Coinapult is now protected by CloudFlare, a service which aims to improve the availability of websites and mobile apps.

Earlier this year, a few bitcoin firm hacking incidents were also seen, including Bitstamp’s loss of approximately $5 million in January. In Canada, bitcoin exchange CAVirtex was forced to halt its operations after losing sensitive security information such as passwords and two-factor authentication in an attack.