The head of marketing at NiceHash, Andrej P. Škraba, confirmed the hacking incident to Reuters. He explained that the hack was "a highly professional attack with sophisticated social engineering". He confirmed that the company was co-operating with local authorities but declined to give more information.

Earlier, NiceHash halted all operations on its website for at least 24 hours. It has published an announcement on its homepage about the security breach and informs its clients that an attack was carried out on its Bitcoin wallet. NiceHash is still looking into how many bitcoins got stolen. As a precautionary measure it advises its users to change their passwords and has promised to keep them updated with the investigations (both the official and internal) into the incident.

"We understand that you will have a lot of questions, and we ask for patience and understanding while we investigate the causes and find the appropriate solutions for the future of the service," NiceHash writes on its website. It also adds that it is working hard to rectify the matter in the coming days.

Reuters reports that NiceHash is a Slovenian-based digital currency marketplace that matches people looking to sell processing time on their computers in exchange for the digital currency bitcoin.