Coinbase says hackers bribed staff to steal customer data, demanding $20M ransom

Post by rkagerer » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:45 PM UTC

vonneumannstan wrote: post #284

rkagerer wrote: post #239

Coinbase seems to be going to great lengths to try and distance themselves from the so-called "rogue overseas support agents". If they were Coinbase employees or contractors, that means the company basically sold its own data to hackers, who then turned around and demanded a ransom. Reimbursing duped customers makes sense, as it seems like they would have a pretty straightforward case to make in court that Coinbase's…

>If they were Coinbase employees or contractors, that means the company basically sold its own data to hackers, who then turned around and demanded a ransom. This seems like a strange interpretation. If an employee at your company, against policy and likely illegally extracts proprietary data and gives it to hackers in exchange for money you can hardly say that "My company sold it's data".

Post by modeless » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:47 PM UTC

w-ll wrote: post #259

modeless wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Important Notice" I got says "This included information related to your account". Also I got an email earlier on April 1 about a breach that sounds very similar if it's not the same one.

Sorry to pester, that exact wording? I see "We wanted to let you know that we detected activity suggesting that information related to your account may have been accessed in a way that did not align with our internal policies." in the email i got this morning

Post by drexlspivey » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:50 PM UTC

growlNark wrote: post #161

I'm surprised they only demanded $20M. Surely that customer data is potentially worth, like, potentially orders-of-magnitude more. Correspondingly I'd assume either a) paying the ransom doesn't take it off the market or b) the info they stole isn't that interesting.

Post by zardo » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:52 PM UTC

suzzer99 wrote: post #223

zamadatix wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People with "significant" crypto balances are being assaulted on the street and in their own homes, and family members are being kidnapped for ransom. "Significant" in this case can be $10k or less. I wonder why, select a person completely at random and by median you'll get just as much from what they have sitting in their checking account. Select a nicer area for an order of magnitude more. That's not encouragemen…

The median person does not have $10k sitting in a checking account that they can easily withdraw. My gut feeling is that the threat of kidnapping is a lot more serious in some countries. The US maybe not so much.

Post by scyclow » Thu, May 15, 2025, 10:00 PM UTC

thepasswordis wrote: post #56

The problem is that it seems like the data that leaked is also the data that would be used to do account recovery. And what that means is that 1) If you lose access to your account (through either your own fault, or coinbases fault) that the process of recovering it may not be so straightforward anymore. 2) Hackers can try to “recover” accounts now using this leaked info. This is a huge problem. What coinbase needs a…