In a recent blog post, data breach monitoring service LeakedSource has revealed that leading cryptocurrency exchange BTC-E.com and largest bitcoin discussion forum Bitcointalk.org suffered major hacks in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

According to the post, over 500,000 users of BTC-E.com were hacked in October 2014. The data contained usernames, emails, passwords, ip addresses, register dates, languages and some internal data such as how many coins the user had.

“They [BTC-E.com] used some unknown password hashing method which currently makes their passwords completely uncrackable although that may change. This is good because if the passwords were easy to crack, hackers could log into the exchange and start stealing members Bitcoins”, LeakedSource said and added that it hasn’t seen any news about BTC-E losing all customer’s coins yet.

The second hack mentioned by the source is about Bitcointalk.org, in which 499,593 users were under attack in May 2015. LeakedSource said that the forum knows about the breach. The data contained usernames, emails, passwords, birthdays, secret questions, hashed secret answers and some other internal data.

According to the online post, only 44,869 (9%) of users on Bitcointalk.org used MD5 hashing with a unique salt for passwords. Of those, LeakedSource cracked 30,389 or 68%, and said that the remaining 91% of user passwords were hashed with "sha256crypt", which would take it almost a year to crack an estimated 60-70% of them.

“This method of password storage is far superior to nearly every website we've seen thus far”, it added.