KickCoin smart contract loses $7.7M worth of tokens in hack

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Another day and another hack in the crypto space with the latest victim being Kickico, which experienced a staggering loss of 70 million KickCoin tokens valued at an estimated $7.7 million.

According to a press officer of the company who spoke to CoinGeek, the security breach took place last Thursday at around 9:04 (UTC), which resulted in the attackers gaining access to the account of the Kick smart contracts and the tokens of the Kickico platform.

The team got to know about the incident after the complaints of several victims, who did not find tokens worth around $800,000 in their wallets. Initial reports showed that $800,000 worth of Kick tokens were missing, but it was later found out that a total of 70 million of the tokens were stolen, which, at the current exchange rate, is equivalent to $7.7 million.

At the moment, the control over the smart contract has been fully restored. The Kickico team has also promised to return all tokens to their owners, saying, “We’ll return the exact number of stolen tokens to their legitimate owners. We apologize for the inconvenience caused, but can guarantee that the situation is under control.”

The hackers gained access to the private key of the owner of the KickCoin smart contract. In order to hide the results of their activities, they employed methods used by the KickCoin smart contract in integration with the Bancor network: hackers destroyed tokens at approximately 40 addresses and created tokens at the other 40 addresses in the corresponding amount. As a result, the total number of tokens in the network has not changed.

Kickico is an online blockchain technology-based platform for fundraising in cryptocurrencies, collecting more than 84,000 ETH during its initial coin offering (ICO). Users whose tokens have been missing due to the hack should send an email to the Kickico team to demand a refund.

Ethereum may have had the first-mover advantage when it comes to tokenization, but it’s also plagued with numerous security issues. The Ethereum network also doesn’t scale or work as a cryptocurrency. Bitcoin Cash (BCH), in comparison, can do everything Ethereum—and all the other platforms—can do and more. In fact, smart contracts is already available with Bitcoin BCH following the May network upgrade, which increased the block size to 32MB and also restored certain OP_Codes for advanced functionality.