Mt. Gox: How Many Bitcoins Were Stolen

The biggest hack in cryptocurrency history is what happened at Mt. Gox exchange, from where 850,000 Bitcoins were stolen.

The Story of 850,000 Bitcoins Stolen from Mt. Gox

Of all the hacking incidents that have occurred in the history of cryptocurrencies, the most significant of all was certainly the one that happened to the Japanese stock exchange Mt. Gox in 2014, when a breach of the systems could steal all the Bitcoin assets owned by the company.

This amounted to 850,000 BTC (about 7% of all Bitcoin in circulation at the time) embezzled on several occasions, with a counter value at the time of 475 million dollars. At today’s market prices, the value will now be more than 18 billion dollars.

That episode led to the bankruptcy of the company, which subsequently managed to recover around 200,000 of the stolen Bitcoin, of which it was a very tough legal battle of users, who had lost all their money paid to the exchange.

In July of last year, it appears that the affair finally led to a first resolution involving at least a partial refund to the creditors of the failed exchange.

What Really Happened to Bitcoin from Mt. Gox

It is difficult to understand how the hack on Mt. Gox, which already had had a first attack in 2011, technically happened. As stated by many surveyed cybersecurity experts, it was therefore entirely predictable that the company’s security systems were hackable because they had some flaws.

Anonymous insiders reported that Mt.Gox’s system lacked basic (and vital) features such as version control software and, until a few months before it fell, a testing environment.

Without version control, a Mt. Gox developer even accidentally modified someone else’s code. There was no change history or reliable mechanism for merging code or restoring a known working copy.

Because it lacked a test environment, Mt. Gox this largely untested software to the general public. It is quite clear that highly experienced hackers could have exploited precisely these security flaws relatively easily to enter the system and steal the funds.

Bitcoin withdrawals were reported to have occurred via a wallet.dat. This is a file that contains important data used by the cryptocurrency wallet on your computer. This file contains information such as public/private key pairs for each of the users’ addresses, completed transactions and other sensitive information.

The latest hacks in the crypto world

The hacks carried out by hackers are countless and even greater in value (at the time of the theft) than what was carried out against the Japanese stock exchange.

Starting with the most recent ones hit by Bitfinex or Polygon, which remains one of the biggest hits in terms of the amount of stolen funds.

Last December, a hacker took away 801,601 MATIC, worth around $650 million, before the vulnerability was fixed.

A few weeks ago, however, the FBI arrested two alleged perpetrators of another sensational hackwhereby the two allegedly took 120,000 BTC from the Bitfinex exchange, which took place in 2016.

The two were allegedly betrayed by some large BTC transactions made from one wallet to another, allowing federal agents to trace the likely perpetrators of one of the most blatant thefts committed in the cryptocurrency world.

In a way, even bigger than Mt. Gox hack, is the leak caused by Coincheck, which happened in 2018.

In 2017, Coincheck was considered one of the exchanges with highest crypto trading volume throughout Asia. Then, in January 2018, the company announced that it had lost $534 million in a hack theft.

Also significant was the recent theft of more than 200 million dollars by a hacker group from KuCoin Exchange.