The IOTA foundation has advised users not to make use of their Trinity Wallet, saying that they are currently working with law enforcement and cybersecurity experts to investigate stolen funds emanating from a coordinated attack.
As part of the investigative move, the IOTA foundation has also temporarily stopped the Coordinator, a special node operated by the Foundation, which validates IOTA transactions and supposedly protects the network against specific attacks.
IOTA said it received several reports of fund theft within a short timeframe, and that its decision to halt the Trinity Wallet and the Coordinator is coming as a precaution to prevent further recurrence of theft until the cause is fished out.
According to the IOTA status page, the Foundation has been intensively working to investigate the impact and cause, together with the identified victims. Moreso, the focus of all relevant resources of the Foundation has been shifted to the investigation.
Findings So Far on The IOTA Stolen Funds
The conclusion detailed by the page indicates that most of the evidence disclosed from the investigation so far points towards seed theft; however, the cause is yet to be determined. About ten victims have identified with the Foundation.
All the victims seem to have opened their Trinity Wallet recently, and from an in-depth transaction analysis, the IOTA Foundation confirmed in the post that about half of the victims whose funds were moved out are in contact with them.
While the main cause of the stolen funds and attackers are yet to be discovered from the investigations so far, the IOTA foundation said it would continue to investigate it and update on recent discoveries.
Meanwhile, this is not the first time something similar could happen to IOTA. As of January 2019, Coinfomania reported that the IOTA Foundation was able to recover millions of IOTA tokens that went missing from user wallets.
As at then, Dominik Scheiner, the co-founder and board co-chairman of IOTA, explained, saying;
“From what we know, just a small amount of the 10 million euros has not been found. The exchanges have blocked the hacker’s accounts. He tried to free the money, but he did not succeed.”
MIOTA Overview: Bearish
At the time of writing, MIOTA, the native cryptocurrency of the IOTA platform, is recording significant losses of more than 5% on the day. The coin is trading at $0.321100 with a market cap of $892,506,208 and a 24h trading volume of $36,224,312.
