IOTA Closed for 6th Day, MIOTA up 4% on Remediation Plan

The IOTA (MIOTA) mainnet is closed for the sixth day now, while MIOTA is up almost 4% on the shared remediation plan.

As reported, IOTA first advised people to keep their Trinity wallets closed on February 17, while they investigate the reports of stolen funds, even turning off the Coordinator, a node run by the IOTA Foundation for network protection and transaction confirmation, to prevent additional hacks.

To fix the damage, the foundation shared what they call “the attack remediation plan,” consisting of three steps:

1. Installing the already launched updated version of the Trinity wallet for desktop, over the old version, but with a new password, which allows the users to check their balance and transactions. This build removes the vulnerability and prevents the hackers to access the wallet if they haven’t already done so, the team claims. “Mobile does not appear to have been affected by the attack but we ask that you not to open Trinity Mobile until a new mobile version is released,” IOTA urges.
2. Migrating tokens to safe seeds via a seed migration tool that’ll be released soon, during the to-be-announced migration period, and before the restart of the Coordinator; this is recommended to all users who have opened any version of Trinity since December 17, 2019. Following the migration process, the Coordinator will be restarted and normal operations on the network resumed.
3. Reclaiming the stolen tokens: based on the current data, “only a limited number of bundles were successfully transferred by the attacker out of the true owners’ wallets,” says the platform, and all exchanges have been notified of the discovered compromised bundles. A global snapshot of the network will be performed, which will need community validation, but which would enable IOTA “to bring stolen tokens back to the affected users.” This procedure will also be needed “for certain cases in which the migration tool is used fraudulently or incorrectly,” they said.

Meanwhile, the 23rd coin by market capitalization, MIOTA, has appreciated 3.8% in the past 24 hours, trimming its weekly losses to 15%. Despite the rise in the past day, it seems that MIOTA started to correct its gains. At the time of writing (12:17 UTC), it’s trading at USD 0.27.

MIOTA price chart:

In regards to “the attack incident,” all updates are provided through the status page online for the time being and no additional formation can be released at the moment due to the ongoing investigation, Cara Harbor, Director of Communications at the IOTA Foundation, told Cryptonews.com.

The status page still shows mainnet shut down and devnet operating. However, it states that, from the current data it appears that the hack started on or around January 25, 2020, and that only Trinity Desktop users’ seeds were potentially compromised.

Additionally, IOTA stated that the Coordinator is still down as the remediation plan is being finalized, so the users can’t send value transactions. They also warned that there are active impostors posing as IOTA Foundation personnel on their Discord taking advantage of the situation. Finally, they stated that a new analytics toolset that tracks funds in real-time is in works, and that it’ll be used to help the ongoing investigation.

As reported, the community online has been critical of IOTA’s ability to simply pause the Coordinator. “We stand by our decision to make use of the coordinator’s security features and halt all value transfers during the ongoing investigation, in order to protect the users,” said IOTA, arguing that this allows them to prevent more funds to be stolen while providing time to understand the attack and come up with a mitigation strategy.

Meanwhile, this is not the only hack happening approximately at the same time, but with different methods and results. DeFi (decentralized finance) platform bZx today suffered its second exploit in a few days, with reportedly ETH 3,581 taken in total.