The web accounts of Mark Karpeles, CEO of the volatile Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange, have been repeatedly electronically assaulted, with enraged hackers reportedly evaluating the data after the exchange lost some $465 million in bitcoins in February.
“It's time that Mt. Gox got the Bitcoin community's wrath
instead of [the] Bitcoin community getting goxed,” hackers
wrote in a message posted to Karpeles’ personal website and
Pastebin. The term “Goxed” stems from Mt. Gox repeatedly delaying
its reopening in 2011 (as well as going offline or suspending
trade on numerous other occasions), and means to fool or troll
someone.
"Included in this download you will find relevant database
dumps, csv exports, specialized tools, and some highlighted
summaries compiled from data," the hackers wrote. "No
user database dumps have been included."
The bitcoin exchange filed for bankruptcy in late February after
it was apparently plagued with technical glitches, losing nearly
750,000 bitcoins, or 6-7 percent of total units in circulation.
However, some Mt. Gox users weren’t convinced of the explanation
that technical bugs had caused the loss. Some suggested that the
missing money had been absorbed by Karpeles.
Attacks have subsequently been undertaken on both Karpeles’
personal blog and his Reddit account, to look for evidence that
he was responsible for fraud.
The attackers took as much information as possible surrounding
trading activity at Mt. Gox and stored their findings in a 716MB
file.
The file contained a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet detailing some
one million trades, and another which showed company balances in
18 various currencies, according to Forbes.
The claimed balance of 951,116 bitcoins found by hackers and
outlined in their summary was cited as evidence that Karpeles had
been lying about losing the bitcoins to a bug. “That fat f***
has been lying!!” states a note in the file.
The authenticity of the file is still to be confirmed. However,
some Reddit users told CNET that they could confirm that their
personal account balances matched the data in the posting. Other
Redditors suggested the file contained malware, and as a result
would not open it.
Mt. Gox later released a warning saying that “Spam/Phishing
emails looking as if Mt. Gox was the sender are being sent to our
users. These emails have not been sent by us and should be
phishing emails.”
Despite the loss of some 750,000 bitcoins, there has – as of yet
– been no evidence of their movement in the bitcoin blockchain.
This suggests that the bitcoins are not currently being spent.
At its peak, Mt. Gox was one of the most prominent bitcoin
exchanges in the world. However, on February 7, the platform
suspended its customer withdrawals, and bitcoin plunged – but Mt.
Gox did not stop trading the cryptocurrency.
Mt. Gox filed for US bankruptcy protection in Dallas on Sunday,
after initially filing for bankruptcy protection in Japan on
February 28.