IOTA Foundation Relaunches Network After Trinity Wallet Theft

It’s been almost a month since the IOTA foundation was forced to take their network down in the wake of a massive hack. However, with the dust settled, the Iota Foundation has started to bring its network back online.

Putting The Coordinator Back Into Action

The IOTA network was officially relaunched back on Tuesday after it was forced to close down due to an attack that occurred on the 12th of February. The attack targeted the platform’s Trinity Wallet software and managed to steal about 8.55 million in MIOTA, or about $2 million, from 50 users of the digital asset wallet. This comes despite the network shutting down on the same day of the attack to prevent even further losses.

On a blog post issued out on the 10th of March, the IOTA Foundation announced that the coordinator, the centralized node that curated all transactions on the network, was back online shortly after a seed migration period had occurred.

Planning To Not Repeat Past Events

It was found that the desktop version of Trinity Wallet was vulnerable to hacking after hackers did just that and gained access to the private wallet keys of various customers. The attack itself was attributed to the payment service MoonPay, which allowed users to buy IOTA directly. It took less than a week for the Foundation to start urging its various users to leverage an available migration tool to move their tokens to a new, secure account.

As a response to the theft, IOTA has laid out its plans to try and reduce the number of possible breaches that can occur in the future. In its statement, it explained that the IOTA foundation was overhauling its internal processes. This overhaul includes changes and improvements to its security resources and capabilities, as well as its software security practices. Furthermore, they have started to expand in efforts for best practices and education regarding any software that handles IOTA’s user accounts within the IOTA network.

Crime And Compensation

As per the Foundation itself, the person behind the breach of the 12th of February has yet to be found and is still at large. However, IOTA was quick to point out that it will continue collaborating with German, UK, and Maltese police force, as well as the FBI, to help track and identify this attacker.

David Sønstebø, the founder of IOTA, made an announcement on the 6th of March that detailed his promise to repay all victims of this hack fully. At the time, the 8.55 million IOTA tokens were worth about $2 million. An admirable move, and hopefully done due to moral decision making, instead of PR damage control.