This is the case of yet another hacked crypto exchange based out of China. Very few details are known about the exact approach taken by the hackers.
The crypto world found out when BTER released a statement announcing that 7,170 BTC had been stolen from their cold storage. The company also announced a bounty for recovering the stolen BTC and temporary suspension of transactions on the exchange.
As it turned out, the company could neither recover the lost funds nor compensate all the customers that lost their bitcoins in the hack. As a result, the exchange went defunct.