This has happened to a bitcoin bank. The based in Europa service BIPS announced that thieves broke into their website recently.
The hackers succeeded in stealing of 1295 BTC that is equal to a million dollars. The company informed its customers via the user forums about this incident. BIPS has many services considering bitcoin. The main one is the collection of payment for merchants and the exchange of the crypto currencies for fiat currencies or other forms of money. Also they feature wallets with no fees or commission payment for regular users. The free wallets are similar to bank accounts but are fully electronic and digital as they are used only for digital forms of money.
The company in the face of its representative the CEO Kris Henriksen says that they are already aware of the method applied by the thieves. Their first step was to launch a cyber-attack on the webpage by sending numerous requests for service. In such case the homepage under attack is unable to process all requests and hits as if they had been done by different users from different machines. The site closes down because of this attack. The first attempt enabled the hackers to discover some faults and drawback of the page and its security and they have used it afterwards. Another similar attack was performed in several days. This allowed getting inside the network of the service. They have entered the big wallet of the company where small wallets of the customers were placed. The only thing that was left for them was to transfer all BTC inside them to their personal wallets. In this case the decentralization of the system and anonymity allowed them to stay in the shadow of their deed.
The most unbelievable and uncomfortable thing that the BIPS company has done, was that they have announced that the customers should have been ready for such an unpleasant situation. They have made the comparison that the simple, physical wallets carried in the back pocket of the trousers can also be removed unnoticed by criminals while You walk on the street. The users were embarrassed. The promises of safety were merely a lie. Currently the page of wallets is closed due to security maintenance.
Now the affected users are waiting for further information from BIPS. Generally the company will close this service for some time and start to develop a more secure and trustworthy system. Sometime later it will once again be introduced for the wide society. Everyone understands that wallet hosting is not the main specialization of the company on the Bitcoin market. But still who will answer for the loss of money?
All current users are taking their money from their wallets hosted by BIPS and try to search for the technical support as the help desk is within the reach of the customers.