$250,000 worth of Bitcoins stolen in net heist

Source: NBC

A security breach at a purveyor of virtual currency Bitcoins (BTC) has resulted in the loss of very real dollars totaling around $250,000. Bitfloor, a major banking and exchange service for Bitcoins, may be facing shutdown after nearly their entire inventory was stolen.

Bitcoins are an experimental currency used mainly for online transactions. The total number of BTC is limited and new ones can only be "mined" very slowly. The value of a Bitcoin has fluctuated wildly in the three years since the currency was established, from as little as a few pennies to over $30. At today's valuation (around $10 each), the estimated 24,000 BTC stolen from Bitfloor equate to about $250,000.

The founder of Bitfloor, Roman Shtylman, announced the security breach on BitcoinTalk, a forum dedicated to discussion of the currency:

Last night, a few of our servers were compromised. As a result, the attacker gained accesses to an unencrypted backup of the wallet keys (the actual keys live in an encrypted area). Using these keys they were able to transfer the coins. This attack took the vast majority of the coins BitFloor was holding on hand. As a result, I have paused all exchange operations.



Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/250-000-worth-bitcoins-stolen-net-heist-980871

---

***********
I was going to put this in the Romney tax hack thread but there were a lot of posts (90).
This is additional information, not necessarily connected.... or is it?