After nearly a month of being shut down following a massive hack, the IOTA network is finally back online. The IOTA Foundation relaunched its network after dealing with the fallout from the Feb. 12 attack on its Trinity Wallet which saw around 8.55 million MIOTA — approximately $2 million — stolen from users.
Posted on its official Twitter page on March 10, the IOTA Foundation shared the good news with its followers:
“We are delighted to announce that the Coordinator has been resumed. Read about the steps taken to protect Trinity users, the role of the Coordinator & the future development of IOTA,” the statement read.
IOTA has also resumed its Coordinator centralized node which is designated to confirm all transactions on the network as well as fend off attacks. This was announced in a March 10 blog post by the IOTA Foundation following a seed migration period. A new version of the Coordicide protocol is also expected to be released soon.
Notably, IOTA co-founder David Sonstebo has offered to cover the compensation to all users who lost money following the hack attack. In the meantime, the IOTA Foundation has urged all users of its proprietary Trinity Walle to utilize the seed migration tool in order to protect their coins.
“If you used Trinity between 17th Dec 2019–17th Feb 2020 and you have not migrated your seed during the migration period, make sure to create a new seed in Trinity and transfer your funds from your old seed.” IOTA Foundation shared.
Preventing additional attacks on the network
The IOTA Foundation has stated that the person(s) responsible for the Feb. 12 breach is yet to be found, but they will continue to work with the FBI and police in the UK, Germany, and Malta to identify and track the hacker. The foundation also laid out its plans to significantly reduce the possibility of future breaches:
“The IOTA Foundation is overhauling its internal processes, with upcoming changes to software security practices, improvements to our security capabilities and resources, and expansion of our efforts in education and best practices for any software that handles user accounts on the IOTA network.”
IOT/USD Technical picture
It took the platform nearly a month to resolve the issue, but it would seem the worst is over and IOTA is ready to reenter the market again. In the time since the attack and the subsequent shutdown, IOT/USD has lost over 40% of its value and is changing hands at $0.194 levels across a number of exchanges, at the time of writing.
Despite the technical woes, the digital asset is still 25% higher from its price levels from the beginning of the year. From a technical standpoint, IOT bottomed at $0.1783 on March 9 following the major sell-off that has plagued not just the cryptocurrency market, but the global financial market as well.
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