$6m stolen in bitcoin hack; TPG drops FTTB - for now; iiNet's shutdown in Perth heat

TPG has withdrawn its fibre-to-the-basement (FTTB) products from sale, citing insufficient time to deal with new regulations imposed by the federal government. But the ISP has said it will reintroduce the products at a later time.

“On 14 December 2014, we were advised of a regulation that precludes us from selling our FTTB products after 1 January 2015 unless we have taken certain steps,” a notice on TPG’s website reads. “There has been insufficient time to complete those steps before 1 January so until we complete the required changes we are required to remove our FTTB products from sale.”

In spite of TPG’s comments about insufficient time, Fairfax quoted a spokesperson for Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull as saying: “It is not correct to suggest that industry only became aware of this in mid-December. … Eighteen submissions were received, including one from TPG.”

TPG’s existing FTTB customers are allowed to keep using the service despite its withdrawal from sale, Fairfax reported.

Since pulling the FTTB product, Fairfax has reported Craig Levy, TPG’s consumer business general manager, as saying the product will return.

“TPG will be reintroducing its FTTB retail plans as well as its wholesale offering in the not too distant future,” Levy is quoted as saying.

$6 million stolen in bitcoin hack

Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp has reopened after closing its virtual doors a week ago following the theft of about $6 million worth of bitcoins.

On Friday, Bitstamp CEO Nejc Kodrič published a blog entry providing some details on the attack.

Kodrič said that on 4 January, some of his company’s “operational wallets” were compromised, with less than 19,000 bitcoins being taken in the attack.

On the day of the attack, 19,000 bitcoins would have been worth around AU$6 million.

“This breach represents a small fraction of Bitstamp’s total bitcoin reserves, the overwhelming majority of which are held in secure offline cold storage systems,” he wrote.

After learning of the breach, Bitstamp suspended its systems to investigate the incident and work with law enforcement officials, the CEO said.

Reuters reported Damijan Merlak, one of Bitstamp's founders, as saying that institutions from the European Union and the US were investigating the security breach.

In Friday’s post, the CEO wrote that Bitstamp was “back open for business with a newly redeployed website and backend systems that are safer and more secure than ever”.

“We can assure customers that any bitcoins held with us prior to temporary suspension of services on January 5th at 9 am UTC are completely safe and will be fully honoured,” he wrote.

The CEO said that after the attack, Bitstamp decided to rebuild its systems “from the ground up from a secure backup” and has implemented several new security measures and protocols.

These include implementation of BitGo multisig technology and adoption of Amazon AWS cloud infrastructure.

iiNet data centre feels the heat

Some iiNet customers went without internet services for about seven hours last Monday, after the company shut down parts of its Perth data centre on a day that saw temperatures climb to almost 45 C.

The company’s CTO, Mark Dioguardi, took to iiNet’s blog the following day to explain.

“Our Perth data centre was subject to a partial failure of both the mains and backup air-conditioning systems yesterday. This, along with the extreme heat necessitated a shut down to a portion of our servers as a precautionary measure at approximately 13:00 WST,” Dioguardi wrote.

According to the CTO, network redundancy plans meant that less than 2% of iiNet customers’ broadband services were affected.

Webmail and account management systems also operated intermittently during the period, Dioguardi said.

“A majority of the issues causing customer impact were resolved at approximately 20:00 WST,” he said.

The company apologised for the incident.

The CTO said the company is conducting a “full investigation” into the incident and taking steps to avoid such an event in the future.

Image courtesy Zach Copley under CC