KickICO, a blockchain-powered crowdfunding platform, was reportedly hacked on July 26, which resulted in a loss of over 70 million KICK tokens worth an estimated $7.7 million. The project’s team revealed the hackers managed to access “the account of the KICK smart contract,” thus stealing the tokens.
KickICO’s official incident report noted they had “experienced a security breach [and] learned about the incident after the complaints of several victims, who did not find tokens worth 800 thousand dollars in their wallets.” The report added that the blockchain network’s developers had managed to regain control over their smart contract account
The project’s team assured users their stolen tokens will be returned. Token holders were told to report all their complaints to official KickICO representatives.
“We’ll return exact amount of tokens to [the wallets of] their legit owners. We apologize for the inconveniences, but guarantee that the situation is under control,” the incident report stated.
According to KickICO’s developers, hackers were able gain access to the private key associated with the token’s smart contract. After that, “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 overall number of KickCoins remained intact.
Avoiding Further Losses
The report went on to acknowledge the timely response the KickICO community had, which helped the blockchain network’s developers regain control over the stolen funds. Users were also told that preventive measures had been taken to avoid “further losses” by “replacing the compromised private key with the private key of the cold storage.”
Notably, this marks the second time this month that the Tim Draper-backed Bancor network has been associated with a security breach. Some members of the KickICO community have attributed the hacking incident to a dramatic prise rise KICK tokens had the last couple of weeks.
In fact, KickICO’s report noted that the platform’s native token “tripled in price in the last two weeks (from $0.04 to $0.12).” The report also mentioned that KickCoins ranked “among top 10 coins in [terms of the rate of price increase] last week.”
