Nicehash Hacked Potentially For as much as $60 Million in Bitcoin

News broke that  "highly professional" hackers made off with around 4,700 Bitcoin from a leading mining service, a Bitcoin exchange has said.The value of Bitcoin is currently extremely volatile, but at the time of writing, the amount stolen was worth approximately $80m.

Igal Zeifman, security evangelist Imperva Incapsula, said: “As a rule, extortionists and other cybercriminals are commonly drawn to successful online industries, especially emerging ones that are less likely to be well-protected.

"Attackers can make a lot of money when attacking crypto exchanges due to factors such as the anonymity of the cryptocurrencies, hence the ability to “get rid” of the stolen goods with limited risk.

"In Imperva’s latest DDoS Report we discovered that 73.9 percent of all bitcoin exchanges and related sites on the Imperva Incapsula service were attacked in Q3 2017. As a result, the relatively small and young industry made it into the top-10 most attacked industries this quarter. The DDoS attacks we mitigated could have been attempts to manipulate the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrency, something we know offenders had tried in the past.”