The CS:GO community was shocked as it woke up to the unfortunate news of a major hack targeting one of the biggest and well-established skin trading marketplaces; CS.MONEY, resulting in the loss of 6 Million Dollars worth of skins.
It is the biggest attack launched on a CS:GO marketplace to date which raised so many question marks on how it happened and whether the users were affected by this attack.
Unfortunately, according to the Chief Communications Officer at EX CORP, the parent company of CS.MONEY, approximately one third of the skins belong to users.
This isnât a loss for the company only but rather for the entire community as skin enthusiasts, These actions are never accepted nor tolerated towards anyone as the only end result of it is to harm businesses people worked hard for.
How CS.MONEY Got Hacked
An update was posted by Tim Sobolevsky (Chief Communications Officer) a day after the attack explaining how the hack happened.
Apparently, the hackers gained access to multiple CS.MONEY bots and proceeded to send trade offers to different accounts in an attempt to steal their inventories.
They also sent transaction offers to well-known traders and famous figures in the community to hide their tracks and become untraceable or so they thought.
CS.MONEY were later alerted by their internal system after a sharp drop in their skin stock which meant that the skins were already stolen.
Skins graphThis seems to be a well planned attack which led the people at CS.MONEY to think that the site itself was hacked, They immediately took action by disabling authorization of all external devices and services. However, After further inspection and taking a look at the transaction database, it recorded no exchanges in its logs, meaning the bots werenât controlled by CS.MONEY but rather by the hackers.
The trade offers had bot messages which third party websites usually add on when buying or trading using the website, but the hackers used messages from other websites to deceive and further hide their tracks.
The attack continued till early in the morning as they managed to make around 1000 trade offers with about 100 user accounts in the first day.
Every attempt to regain control over the bots & save what’s left faced a wall since the hackers had direct access to the Mobile Authentication files explaining how they managed to steal that much amount of skins.
With so much on the line, CS.MONEY were ready to pay 100,000$ for whomever helps in understanding how the hackers took over the bots.
Will I Get My Skins Back?
Thereâs no doubt that the users of CS.MONEY are biting their nails when it comes to their items. Luckily enough, a follow up update was posted by the CCO bringing some good news after a long nerve wrecking week.
They managed to recover half of the stolen skins so far. In less than a week the items will be tradable and both of CS.MONEY & user owned skins will return to the website.
The entire team behind the operation is working tirelessly to ensure the items will return to the owners or compensate in case they fail to to get certain items back.
Itâs worth mentioning how the great community of CS:GO helped in returning the items, traders who were publically willing to give the items back to CS.MONEY, Over a dozen of the biggest marketplaces banning the stolen skins on their website in addition to the support of thousands of users.
Because good news never comes alone, They finally managed to learn how the hack was done and on top of that successfully found who the hacker was.
âHowever, we can already tell you that we have found the one who hacked us, and weâve learned exactly how it was done. While we were at it, we regained control over the accounts used to store the stolen skins.â – Tim Sobolevsky – CCO
As stated by Tim Sobolevsky, CS.MONEY was founded by a team of enthusiasts whoâve been growing and learning from their mistakes.
For that reason neither this, nor any other incident will make them lose their passion for gaming, skins and their community, let alone stop them.
What does not kill you will only make you stronger, hoping to see CS.MONEY back functioning better than ever and as soon as possible.
By the date of publishing of this article, CS.MONEY team has managed to recover the website and the service is available for users.
