Response to Coincheck Hack
Time Machine Series

Jason Lee, Australasia’s Director of Partnerships and Strategic Alliances at the NEM.io Foundation, told Kyodo News in a phone interview that on Saturday (27th Jan 2018), just hours after the hacking attack, the Coincheck team was in contact with the NEM team.

Roughly 58 billion yen ($532 million) in NEM was stolen from Coincheck on Friday, marking the largest ever loss of cryptocurrency to hackers.

Within 24 to 48 hours, the NEM team had developed a solution by tagging the stolen cryptocurrency as tainted funds, making them easy to verify if withdrawn from or deposited to regulated trading platforms. That, Lee said from Hong Kong, “would allow us to potentially identify the hackers.” However he conceded that “at this moment we don’t know where they are.”

We’re hoping that the hackers will eventually return the money.” “We have done what we could from the NEM foundation’s side…so the only way we can track whether the hackers have done anything…is (to monitor) their next move.”

He said that if the missing funds are transacted through a licensed cryptocurrency exchange then they will be able to have more information on the tokens itself. However, he added that “there could be other avenues for them to cash out” and that if the missing funds are not transacted through an exchange, “the identity will be difficult to check.”

So far, Japanese authorities have been dealing directly with Coincheck in the investigations, Lee said. If asked for assistance, his foundation “would do its level best in ensuring that this investigation is dealt with full integrity and transparency.”

Lee said the sole purpose of the foundation is to introduce, educate and promote the use of the NEM blockchain technology platform, which it did not itself create, on an international scale to all industries and institutions.

He urged cryptocurrency exchanges to install NEM’s built-in security feature, a “multi signature verification” that requires more than one person to acknowledge the movement of funds.

In Coincheck’s case, “they did not implement the multi signature verification,” he said. He emphasized that the incident has nothing to do with the NEM blockchain, which remains “one of the most secure and simple blockchain systems to use.”

Originally published on: https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2018/01/27d03eee6750-nem-experts-tagged-missing-cryptocurrency-to-help-track-culprit.html
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['Announcements', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Nem', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain']