The hack came as Bitcoin has skyrocketed in value over the last several weeks, surpassing $17,000 per bitcoin for the first time. That meant the value of the hacked bitcoins came to about $70 million – or, to put it in Bitcoin terms, the hackers stole around 4,700 bitcoins from NiceHash’s servers. It looks like the unnamed hackers were able to break into the NiceHash server using a deceptively simple means: The login credentials of a NiceHash engineer. Over the course of his video statement, Kobal didn’t specify whether the hackers could have accessed funds or personal information from any user accounts, but an earlier statement from NiceHash that immediately followed the crime sheds a little (and I do mean a little) more light on what happened: Even though the recent NiceHash hack is among the largest such crimes ever in terms of cash value, 4,700 bitcoins isn’t much compared to other recent bitcoin heists: In 2015, European cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp was taken for roughly 19,000 bitcoins, while last year hackers took almost 120,000 bitcoins from Hong Kong exchange Bitfinex – and to give you an idea of how much growth Bitcoin has seen since then, that haul was worth about $65 million at the time, less than the value of the more recently stolen 4,700 bitcoins by a significant margin.
