From Thwarting an Attack to New Listings: It’s Been a Busy Month for KICKICO

Hacking attacks are not new in the crypto community. Ever since Mt. Gox infamously lost over 800,000 BTC to hackers in one of the biggest heists ever, many other projects have been targeted. Hackers are evolving with time, and as was witnessed in the recent KICKICO hack, they are becoming more creative. The hackers managed to get away with over $7 million worth of KickCoins before the security team at the Moscow-based team regained control. This hasn’t fazed the company, however, and according to an executive, KICKICO is back on its feet and already planning major moves including new exchange listings.

Backward Never

On July 26, the KICKICO team received several complaints from users who reported that they were missing some of the tokens stored in their wallets. The security team was quickly alerted and unearthed an attack by hackers who had managed to get away with 70,000,000 KickCoins, valued at over $7.7 million. The company then took to its Medium page to notify its community of the attack and to assure them that the situation was under control.

It was the unique way the hackers used to get away with the coins that piqued the interest of many. Having gained access to the private key belonging to the owner of the KickCoin smart contract, the hackers then destroyed tokens held at 40 addresses and then created tokens at 40 other addresses. This ensured that the total number of tokens in the network remained constant, which might have made detection harder. Luckily, the KICKICO team responded quickly and replaced the compromised key with the cold storage key.

According to Valeriya Minaeva, an executive at KICKICO, the company is on top of things and will destroy all the stolen tokens. Speaking exclusively to NullTX, Minaeva stated that the company would refund the stolen tokens. The company has also taken measures to ensure such an attack never happens again.

Serious measures have been taken quickly to strengthen the security features of the platform, one of which is the change of the main wallet address. The main wallet address (Contract Owner) was previously created for 1 person; now it has been changed to a multisignature wallet (and with this one, the hackers will need to steel 3 keys to duplicate such operations), so in the future it will not happen again, as it is nearly impossible to lose all 3 keys.

Unfazed by the recent attack, KICKICO is already looking to the future, and as revealed by Minaeva, KickCoin is now listed on CoinBene. The Singaporean exchange jumped into the limelight after it overtook Binance to become the biggest crypto exchange in the world last month. The rapid rise to the top was brought about by the exchange’s new transaction fee mining model which rewards users with native tokens for every BTC or ETH incurred as charges.

The company will give away one million KickCoins to its users who trade KICK on CoinBene. The top trader will receive 120,000 tokens, which at press time amounted to $108,000, with the other top 50 traders receiving tokens as well.

KICKICO also revealed in a blog post on August 6 that after some members of the team had failed to reach a consensus on the future of the crowdfunding platform, they had gone their separate ways and have become an independent project. Known as Ucommunity, the new project will be released officially in a month’s time, with the founder of KICKICO, Anti A. Danilevski, now being solely in charge of the KICKICO team. The Ucommunity team will distribute new tokens to KickCoin holders via airdrops.