WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department has recovered most of a multimillion-dollar ransom payment made to hackers after a cyberattack that caused the operator of the nation's largest fuel pipeline to halt its operations last month, officials said Monday.
Wallets used by cryptocurrency exchanges are somewhat vulnerable to hacking. For instance, Japan-based Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox shut down and declared bankruptcy a few years back after hackers systematically relieved it of more than $450 million in Bitcoin exchanged over its servers.

Without a clear track record to assess long-term value, cryptocurrency rises and falls on an unpredictable demand cycle. And for individual investors, the challenge is “you really don’t know where supply and demand can end up,” Aliaga-Díaz says.
However, while there are some organisations that accept it as currency, others shy away due to Bitcoin’s dramatic price swings. Driven largely by speculation, the price per Bitcoin rose sharply from $1,151 in January 2017, to an all-time high of $19,783 in December the same year.* It then dropped to below $7,000 by February 2018 and rallied again to around $11,000 over a matter of days, before plunging once more to trade below $4,000. Subsequently, one of the key characteristics of Bitcoin that traders should understand is its potential for extreme volatility.