The Independent Republic

The ongoing issue of cybercrime in the crypto world has struck again and this time it’s the initial coin offering KickICO hosted that’s come under attack. According to a statement published on the ICO’s Medium page, the attacked happened just after 9:00am on July 26. Although the exact method used to infiltrate the platform is unclear, the tech team confirmed that the hackers pulled off the virtual heist by breaching the KickCoin platform. By gaining access to the project’s smart contract, the criminals were able to replace 40 addresses with fake ones containing the same amount of KICK tokens. The ruse allowed the hijackers to siphon off around 70 million coins with an approximate value of $7.7 million.

A Swift and Successful Response from KickICO

The KickICO hack almost went undetected as the criminals took the time to delete the fraudulent accounts once they’d finished. However, the incident came to light after a user reported that $800,000 had gone missing from his wallet. As soon as one string was loose, the whole crime started to unravel. To avoid becoming another disaster story on the ICO list of cybercrime victims, the KickICO’s response was swift and decisive. Instead of running from the issue, CEO Anti Danilevski promised a full refund.

“Thanks to the rapid response of our community and our coordinated team work [sic], we were able to regain control over the tokens and prevent further possible losses by replacing the compromised private key with the private key of the cold storage. KICKICO guarantees to return all tokens to KickCoin holders. We apologize for the inconveniences,” Danilevski said.

The Top ICOs Could Learn from KickICO

With investors guaranteed not to lose out, the price of Kick has actually risen since the news broke. In the past, other ICO news stories of this nature have seen the price of a token come crashing down. However, by taking positive action, KickICO has given itself the opportunity to be praised as a top project in the same way the Buttrfly ICO was recently recognized by CoinAgenda. Despite developers taking every possible precaution, cyber attacks are a natural consequence of the ICO industry.

Indeed, with the ICO list of investments for June alone topping $1.5 billion, the attraction for criminals is obvious. However, as KickICO has shown, a security breach doesn’t have to be the death of an initial coin offering. Although the ultimate goal is to stop incidents from happening in the first place, the response of the affected company is just as important. Even though KickICO will want to move on from the recent breach, other ICOs should use it as an example of how to handle things.