Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 61 posts

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

#21

Post by Tehnix »

kordless wrote: post #10
chasing wrote: post #4

> A hacker can simply break into your account, steal your bitcoin by sending it off to his own account, and no one has to hold any type of accountability? I thought lack of regulation was one of the features of Bitcoin.

Why are you comparing Coinbase features with Bitcoin features?

Why wouldn't he? I don't know of any online anything that refunds you from their own pocket, so, that he can't get the transaction back (like some bank account transactions can be, or, they can be traced to a person) is a feature inherent to Bitcoin and not so much Coinbase.

EDIT: spelling correction.

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

#22

Post by anu_gupta »

whileonebegin wrote: post #16
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.…

> I had used the same email and pw on that account.

You used the same credentials for a social networking site as for your Bitcoin account with Coinbase? And you didn't change them once your Twitter account was hacked?

You should probably call it a relatively cheap lesson in not reusing passwords.

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

#23

Post by RyanZAG »

Hilarious. The reason for bitcoin is lack of regulation. You know that right? You're using bitcoins and not dollars because it's not regulated and subject to the same oversights and related fees.

So basically you want the government to have no ability to lock down funds or regulate transfers, yet you also want the ability for the government to step in and stop people who have stolen your bitcoins.

Can people really be this oblivious? If you have bitcoins, do not just put them on random websites with zero auditing and expect them to be in any way secure. If you don't know how to secure a computer, you need to stay far away from bitcoins, they are not for you.

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

#26

Post by Tehnix »

Same happened to me on MtGox (to make it clear, not their fault, was my own carelessness). Was more than likely related to reuse of password and a hack on another site that used the same acc/pass combination.

There is nothing one can do. MtGox can't protect users from getting their account hacked when it's nothing they've done. I filed a police report, but there's not much the police can do in the case of btc...

One learns from ones mistakes, so, now; stopped reusing passwords, and added two-way auth for important/sensitive things, alas, a bit too late (got 9 btc stolen ;_; although at the time, they were only worth ~100$/btc).

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

#27

Post by elwell »

RyanZAG wrote: post #23

Hilarious. The reason for bitcoin is lack of regulation. You know that right? You're using bitcoins and not dollars because it's not regulated and subject to the same oversights and related fees. So basically you want the government to have no ability to lock down funds or regulate transfers, yet you also want the ability for the government to step in and stop people who have stolen your bitcoins. Can people really b…

What do you mean "random websites"? It's Coinbase, the most reputable bitcoin wallet that exists. (Though they have had a few troubles as of late.)

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

#28

Post by Tehnix »

RyanZAG wrote: post #23

Hilarious. The reason for bitcoin is lack of regulation. You know that right? You're using bitcoins and not dollars because it's not regulated and subject to the same oversights and related fees. So basically you want the government to have no ability to lock down funds or regulate transfers, yet you also want the ability for the government to step in and stop people who have stolen your bitcoins. Can people really b…

I think he's more interested if the police can do something, since the trail can be somewhat followed, and, you can often see an ip of the transaction requester. They more than likely can't do anything in these cases though, since that's something one can easily tamper with and it's quite unreliable (the IP thing).

Also, if there is anything Coinbase does, or, if one there is any laws regarding such things that might help him.

Agreed on the part about he should take more care with security though, two-way auth etc etc.

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

#30

Post by Tehnix »

wtvanhest wrote: post #19

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?

You can take a look at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet and maybe less directly relevant, but still good information is https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses .

Personally, I keep my btc wallet.dat file in a AES encrypted diskimage (sparsebundle on OS X) in my Dropbox, and then symlink that file to the place where it needs to be on the computer. My wallet is always backed up, and secure enough (you need either physical access to my computer and get the password right, or, access to my dropbox account and, again, the password for the wallet diskimage).

Quite content with my setup, I just mount the diskimage before I open my Wallet application...

Post reply on HN