The British exchange with Ukrainian roots BTC-Alpha, which suffered at the beginning of the month from a hacker attack, announced a phased resumption of work.
According to Vitaly Bodnar, CEO of the exchange, users can already restore access rights to accounts. At the same time, they must necessarily establish two-factor authentication.
Customers are also advised to change their email and other account passwords if they match the BTC-Alpha passwords.
“Passwords were stored in encrypted form, but if desired and with powerful equipment, they can be decrypted. By default, we consider this data compromised,” Bodnar said.
For security reasons, the exchange has increased the withdrawal time. For verified users, it will be 6 hours, for unverified users – 24 hours.
“We assume that hackers could infect some users’ computers in order to steal funds. The user, if he notices suspicious activity, will have time to react, and the support service will have time to sort it out,” explained the CEO of the platform.
In addition, when withdrawing funds, verified users will undergo additional video verification.
During the call, they will be required to show an identity document to the camera.
For unverified users, BTC-Alpha has lowered the withdrawal limit to $100 per day. To increase the amount, the client will have to pass verification.
The developers temporarily disabled internal transfers and canceled Alpha codes. According to Vitaly Bodnar, all funds that were created in Alpha codes have returned to the user’s balances.
To work with trading bots and analytics, users will have to create new API keys, since the old ones have been deleted.
In the next stages, the exchange team plans to launch trading on key pairs and open the possibility of depositing. They did not name specific dates.
Recall that in early November, unknown persons hacked the computers of several BTC-Alpha employees. They stole user passwords stored in encrypted form, but the funds, according to representatives of the exchange, were not affected.
Among the possible reasons for the attack, representatives of the exchange called information leakage.