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So, my Coinbase account was hacked, bitcoin stolen, now what?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: So, my Coinbase account was hacked, bitcoin stolen, now what?

#11

Post by nkohari »

There is limited ability to trace transfers by examining the blockchain, but there is no way to cancel or reverse a Bitcoin transaction. Most online wallet services, including Coinbase, offer no explicit insurance against unauthorized transfers.

Welcome to the brave new world!

Re: So, my Coinbase account was hacked, bitcoin stolen, now what?

#12

Post by tzz »

How does this happen with two factor SMS verification? Did you enable your API key?

What is the whole address and transaction id just to trace and see where it went? There is no way to cancel the transaction.

[edit]

Here is the info[1] about the transaction. It seems the transaction way relayed by IP address 71.206.70.250, somewhere in Florida (Comcast customer). It also seems the address[2] only holds your balance for now. You can call Comcast and let them know.

[1]https://blockchain.info/tx/d3f6547f901b45b3c79315e78a1bbcc98...

[2]https://blockchain.info/address/12aW8jPeEc9iQa5ocXCDReJ6Nij4...

Re: So, my Coinbase account was hacked, bitcoin stolen, now what?

#14

Post by kordless »

If you turned on your API key Coinbase and someone obtains that key, they can transfer coin on your behalf. From a productive paranoia perspective, I think this is a REALLY BAD IDEA for exactly the reasons posted here. People will use that key to 'try out' coinbase, and then end up forgetting to check their code and upload it to Github or Pastebin and then WHAM, you've got two problems: your Bitcoin is gone and Coinbase now has a marketing problem of potentially epic proportions.

The guys at Coinbase need to turn OFF the API key feature as soon as possible. It has the potential of hurting the entire ecosystem.

Edit: One suggestion to Coinbase would be to change the API key feature to only allow the API methods which don't result in sending payments. This allows quick use of their APIs in doing architectural design and ensures protection against key leakage. A second suggestion is to queue up outgoing transactions initiated by the API key into batches and use alerts (like through Pagerduty or similar) to notify the account owner transactions are pending and need approval.

Re: So, my Coinbase account was hacked, bitcoin stolen, now what?

#16

Post by whileonebegin »

tzz wrote: post #12

How does this happen with two factor SMS verification? Did you enable your API key? What is the whole address and transaction id just to trace and see where it went? There is no way to cancel the transaction. [edit] Here is the info[1] about the transaction. It seems the transaction way relayed by IP address 71.206.70.250, somewhere in Florida (Comcast customer). It also seems the address[2] only holds your balance f…

I didn't have two-factor enabled (it's enabled now though). API was disabled. No malware installed.

Transferred to: 12aW8jPeEc9iQa5ocXCDReJ6Nij4c9xHtX

Transaction: d3f6547f901b45b3c79315e78a1bbcc988e27e6b98feab321f5628e2312b5377

I think this might be related to a recent Twitter account hack that happened a month or so ago, where a fake tweet was posted on the account. I had used the same email and pw on that account. Maybe they were scanning the stolen Twitter accounts against Coinbase.

Re: So, my Coinbase account was hacked, bitcoin stolen, now what?

#17

Post by justincormack »

For less than $100, there is nothing you can do except learn from this. There would probably not be anything you could do if it was a few orders of magnitude larger either, so you are lucky.

Hacking is pervasive, but anonymous currencies are providing a more interesting target than sending spam or renting botnets. Generally, security is very poor everywhere but most people don't really notice. This is going to have to change at some point as more of our lives go online.

Re: So, my Coinbase account was hacked, bitcoin stolen, now what?

#19

Post by wtvanhest »

I've been on the sidelines for BitCoin for the past few years, but it appears to me that it is gaining adoption at least at the early adopter stage and has an insanely long way to go but is becoming increasingly interesting.

I'm researching BitCoin to try to have a really in depth understanding of it. What is the best, even if complex, paper/blog/website on how to properly secure bitcoins?

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