David Sønstebø announced that he will reimburse the victims’ funds with his resources and not with those of the Foundation. The cyberattack affected a total of 46 people last month.
The founder of the IOTA project, David Sønstebø, reported in recent days that he will assume the losses generated by the hack of the Trinity wallet, on February 12th, not the IOTA Foundation. In a message spread on the Internet, Sønstebø said that he felt responsible for what had happened and that the affected users are innocent victims.
The cyberattack affected 46 users, who lost 8.52 million MIOTA with an estimated price of USD 1.63 million, as Sønstebø had previously revealed. The executive confirmed the reactivation of the network, which occurred on March 10th, after disconnecting the “Coordinator” node to prevent further theft of funds from users’ accounts.
The developer said that, in practice, this meant that he will use a significant amount of his assets to solve this unfortunate incident. He stated that he had made that decision to safeguard the IOTA Foundation. He also stressed that the procedure will require some paperwork, as well as the application of the know-your-customer (KYC) procedure, which the Foundation will conduct.
As Sønstebø explained, he assumed that responsibility because both he and the Foundation had invited the users to use the wallet. The entrepreneur made it clear that, even although he is not legally responsible for what happened, he will take care of all the refunds. It was also reported that an unspecified amount of stolen MIOTA has already been marketed in various exchange houses.
The episode with the Trinity wallet occurred in the month of February, after the report of several attacks, which allowed the theft of the funds. The hacker seized the seed words of a group of users, which allowed him to enter their accounts. It should be remembered that the IOTA Foundation had solved a software error last December that prevented the confirmation of transactions over the network, which kept the platform inactive for about 15 hours.
After what happened on February 12th, the Foundation decided to disconnect the network, which resulted in strong criticism from members of the cryptocurrency community. They questioned the fact that a project unilaterally decides to leave its platform out of service for several days.
On the day of the hack, the MIOTA price was USD 0.311261 per unit, while its price is USD 0.1992405 at the time of writing this article, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
On February 17th, five days after the attack, IOTA launched an updated version of the Trinity wallet, which was reported to have a “new secure client.” The reactivation of the network should be an occasion to test the new security measures developed to avoid another attack of this type. Similarly, developers should examine the weaknesses in the system of which the hacker took advantage so that they can optimize the existing security measures.
By Alexander Salazar
