Another day, another ICO hacked. This time, KICKICO, an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) project that lets users conduct ICOs, pre-ICOs, crowdfunding and crowdinvesting campaigns have suffered a security breach and as a result, hackers have stolen more than 70 million KickCoins which is around $7.7 million.
The cyber attack took place on Thursday, July 26th when hackers breached the platform’s security after obtaining the private key of KickCoin’s smart contract and gaining direct access to KICKICO blockchain’s smart contract.
The attack on KICKICO was well planned as according to the company when hackers got their hands on the smart contract of KickCoin, they destroyed tokens at about 40 addresses and created tokens at the other 40 addresses with the exact amount.
In response, KICKICO’s team was quick to block the attack by regaining control over the tokens and replacing the hacked private keys with cold storage private keys. Moreover, the good news is that the company is fully reimbursing 40 affected addresses.
In its official blog post, KICKICO said that:
“KICKICO has experienced a security breach, which resulted in the attackers gaining access to the account of the KICK smart contract — tokens of the KICKICO platform. The team learned about this incident after the complaints of several victims, who did not find tokens worth 800 thousand dollars in their wallets.”
There has been a sudden increase in cyber attacks against ICO projects and cryptocurrency exchanges, thanks to the growing value of Bitcoin. Below is a list of cyber attacks against cryptocurrency exchanges and ICO projects since 2017:
1: July 4th, 2017: Bithumb hacked and 1.2 billion South Korean Won stolen.
2: July 17th, 2017: CoinDash hacked and $7 million in Ethereum stolen.
3: July 24th, 2017: Veritaseum hacked and $8.4 million in Ethereum stolen.
4: July 20, 2017: Parity Technologies hacked and $32 Million in Ethereum stolen.
5: August 22nd, 2017, Enigma marketplace hacked and $500,000 in Ethereum stolen.
6: November 19th, Tether hacked and $30 million worth of tokens stolen.
7: December 7, 2017: NiceHash hacked and $70 million stolen.
9: December 21, 2017: EtherDelta hacked and $266,789 in Ethereum stolen.
10: January 26th, 2018: Coincheck hacked and $534 million stolen.
11: January 29th, 2018: Experty ICO hacked and $150,000 in Ethereum stolen.
12: February 3rd, 2018: BeeToken’s ICO hacked and $1 million worth of Ethereum Stolen.
Image credit: Depositphotos
