Developing: Bitcoinica "Hacked" - Potentially 18,000 BTC ($90,000 USD) Stolen

Bitcoinica has been shutdown until further notice, following a theft of 18,000 BTC. News of the hack was posted this morning by Bitcoinica's founder, Zhou Tong:

"Today, we have discovered a suspicious Bitcoin transaction that doesn't seem to be initiated by any one of the company owners. Some of them are not online at the moment so this is not conclusive.

 Suspicious transaction:

{
"account" : "",
"address" : "182tGyiczhXSSCTciVujNRkkMw1zQxUVhp",
"category" : "send",
"amount" : -18547.66867623,
"fee" : 0.00000000,
"blockhash" : "00000000000003f6bfd3e2fcbf76091853b28be234b5473a67f89b9d5bee019c",
"blockindex" : 1,
"txid" : "7a22917744aa9ed740faf3068a2f895424ed816ed1a04012b47df7a493f056e8",
"time" : 1336738723
},

We have contacted Rackspace to suspend all our servers and lock down our accounts. All your trading and financial data is safe (as far as I know), apart from the Bitcoin loss. Thank you for your patience and understanding while we investigate this issue in detail."

And in a follow-up post:

"Our data is kept inact. Any order placed before the shutdown will still be valid. However, no order execution will happen (no zhoutonging either).
If the market moves significantly, we will come up with a proposal to compensate disadvantaged customers once the investigation is complete."

Bitcoinica was also the victim of a 43,000 BTC ($215,000 USD) heist back on March 1st.

It will be interesting to see how the market is affected by the inability of traders to take leveraged positions in either direction. Also, you should not surf to Bitcoinica.com, as the site has been redirected to a porn site.

Posted in: bitcoinica,hacks