Another cryptocurrency investment platform has been hacked. This time a popular Brazilian platform known as Atlas has become a victim of hackers.
Alarming news about hacker attacks from time to time comes from different parts of the world. Now such news came from Brazil. According to the announcement, a well-known Brazilian crypto trading platform Atlas Quantum suffered a major data theft.
The breach was discovered on Saturday, and the company has already started its investigations into the case. Though the platform claims that all funds of users are safe, this incident led to the loss of personal information by various estimates belonging to 261,000 – 264,000 customers.
Stolen data included names, phone numbers, email addresses, and account balances. But the company stated that users’ passwords and encryption keys remained absolutely safe and intact. The platform informed its clients about the data breach on its official Facebook page:
“We would like to point out that this is not a steal of bitcoins in custody or violation of our accounts in the exchanges. However, our customer base was exposed. At the time of the incident, we took immediate steps to protect the database and passwords and private keys remain encrypted.”
For making investigations of the incident, Atlas needed to disable temporally some of the features of its platform. Moreover, according to the company, at the current moment its specialists are actively monitoring the accounts that were affected by the attack with a view to ensure additional protection of users’ accounts against fraud.
Nevertheless, there is still no precise information whether the data breach occurred as a result of an external invasion or an inside operation.
Atlas Quantum is a Brazil-based investment and trading platform that is reported to manage over $27 million in assets. Users of the platform have an opportunity to add Bitcoin to their accounts and then to use it for buying and selling on various cryptocurrency trading venues, which helps to earn profits on the base of the coin’s value fluctuations and the differences in exchange rates.
The growing number of hacker attacks and breaches on crypto marketplaces shows that such platforms are becoming high profile targets. Experts believe that the threat is really rather high today. Kevin Stear, lead threat analyst at JASK said:
“Even though no funds were stolen from Atlas Quantum users through this breach, it still should set off a serious alarm – for both users and the company – as the initial infiltration could be an early step in footprinting for a much larger campaign for consequential credential stealing and account take-over.”
Last month, another decentralized exchange Zug-based Bancor also suffered a hack. Over $23.5 million were stolen in tokens ($12.5 million of them was in ETH) from smart contracts on the network. After such an incident, the company decided to launch the crime-fighting ‘Crypto Defenders’ initiative with a view to deal with similar cases collectively.