A theft of "about half a million quid worth" of Stellar lumens was stolen by an unidentified hacker on January 13th, tweeted Kevin Beaumont, a cybersecurity researcher.

The attack was made over the weekend by hijacking the DNS (domain name system) server of BlackWallet, a digital currency wallet. The hacker added a piece of code to the wallet, which allowed the transfer into another wallet of any deposits of 20 or more XLM. The altcoin, known as lumens, is issued by Stellar, and subsequently dropped over 20% on its market capitalisation value.

A report by computer help site, Bleeping Computer, stated that the hacker managed to grab almost 670,000 lumens, which was worth some $444,000 at the time of the report.

Shortly after the XLM theft, the funds were being removed from the wallet where they had been stored, with only 100 or so remaining in that wallet as of 19:30 UTC on January 15th. BlackWallet has so far been unavailable for comment, but a reddit user who claimed to be its creator said that the account of his hosting provider had been compromised. He also apologised for the occurrence and was taking steps to have the site taken down, and to get the funds back.