Nicehash Down For Maintenance or Hacked?

By Nathan Kirsch

We just noticed that NiceHash, the online service that allows users to sell the hashrate that their mining hardware generates on altcoin mining , is down. Nicehash announced a service outage on its social media accounts. Nicehas has been down for more than 11 hours now and people are getting upset by the outage. Some are claiming that it isn’t maintenance at all, but rather planned downtime. Others are claiming that NiceHash has been hacked as $56 million in Bitcoin was moved shortly after the maintance began. The address the balance was sent to has been identified, with a grand total of 4736.42 BTC deposited to it just moments before the NiceHash shutdown announcement. Did NiceHash move the funds to do maintenance or was something else happening?

The last update on the NiceHash Twitter account was 7 hours ago and it stated that the maintenance was taking longer than normal.

The NiceHash website just says they are doing Maintenance.

nicehah hacked

BitsOnline noted that NiceHash recently changed their API and speculated that some security loopholes might have been created.”The companys maintenance follows site downtime and revisions to the services API on the 2nd and 4th of December, leading some to think that the update may have opened security holes that allowed an attacker to steal the companys hot bitcoin balance.”

WikiTribune says they been in contact with CEO Andrej Nabergoj, who said that NiceHash is assessing the situation and working with the authorities. Well issue a public statement shortly.

Ouch, if authorities are involved that doesn’t sound like a planned maintenance outage.

We are keeping an eye on the situation and also the many Reddit comments that keep coming in from folks around the world.