Distributed Capital founder Shen Bo was hacked and lost more than $300,000

According to news on December 7, a well-known investor in the blockchain industry was attacked by hackers yesterday.

Hackers claim to have stolen and liquidated 110,000 Augur tokens (REP, valued at more than $300,000) and an unknown amount of Ether belonging to Bo Shen, founder of venture capital firm Fenbushi Capital.

The hacker posted a statement on Shen Bo’s Twitter account, saying that he sold the stolen Augur tokens from 0.0035 BTC (about $2.6) to 0.0026 BTC (about $1.96) last night. As of press time, the price on the Poloniex platform has recovered to 0.004 BTC.

The comments from the hacker suggest that there is a hacker group (or at least a group of people) currently targeting Augur investors, and that this attack is just part of a series of attacks that have occurred in recent weeks.

When the hacker was asked about the purpose of the attack, he responded:

“Obviously it’s about the money.”

In addition, the hacker also confirmed the rumors spread online that his group sold a large amount of Ethereum and Augur coins.

Shen confirmed the hack to CoinDesk, but did not disclose the total amount of money lost. There were rumors that he had lost more than $1 million worth of ether, but Shen responded that the total amount was less than that, but he did not provide further details.

However, the hacker sought to emphasize that, in his opinion, these attacks (at least on Augur) were preventable.

According to the hacker, the group had previously approached Augur’s open-source development team.

Augur core developer Joey Krug admitted that he had previously been in contact with the hacker group, who he said demanded a $60,000 ransom.

“We’ve been sending emails with instructions. If you don’t sell REP tokens on an exchange and you store them in a cold wallet, that’s fine. But if you store them on an exchange, they can change your password and do logins,” Krug said.

Therefore, this attack also reminds investors and blockchain companies what the correct approach should be when storing and maintaining various cryptocurrencies.

A series of attacks

Notably, Krug said he believed the person who carried out this attack was the same hacker who attacked the digital currency exchange Kraken.

“Over the past few months, there have been at least 10 public reports of victims losing cryptocurrency to phone hijacking. The costs have been expensive, embarrassing, and, in one case, life-threatening,” Kraken said in a blog post.

The blog post advises users to avoid using popular communication methods (such as phone calls and text messages) as much as possible. In addition, it also recommends that investors follow a complex 40-step process to protect their assets from being compromised. Krug suggested that for now, investors should pay more attention to using two-step verification when using cryptocurrencies.