Alliance Dao employees Qiao Wang has Detailed a refined scam for social engineering Focused on coinbase users in the midst of the insider-guided data in the business area.
In a post of 15 May on social media, Wang revealed how attackers present themselves as exchange staff with the help of personal data obtained by a recent internal infringement. Individuals contacted him and claimed to represent Coinbase and warn about a supposed compromise on his account before they carried out the steps of identity verification.
The imitators asked details about account balance to give priority to high-quality goals and then gave up victims to transfer assets to a Coinbase portion.
Under the guise of assistance in the arrangement of the wallet, the attackers gave a pre -generated seed sentence, giving them full control as soon as the user has moved the assets.
Wang said he called the scammers at the end of the call:
“I called them at the end of the call and told them to perform their play, because this scam is retarded. They told me [they] Had earned $ 7 million that day. ‘
Personal security in danger
Coinbase previously announced on 15 May that it is one Data breach with less than 1% of the monthly active users. The incident, the company said that it did not endanger login data or private keys, was reduced to bribing a group of overseas customer support agents to leak sensitive data.
Information included names, contact details, identity documents and masked bank and social security data.
According to a statement, Coinbase ended the insiders involved and collaborates with law enforcement to investigate the infringement. CEO Brian Armstrong confirmed that the attackers tried to squeeze $ 20 million in Bitcoin of the company, a requirement that Coinbase rejected.
Instead, the company offers a reward of $ 20 million for information that leads to the arrest of the perpetrators. Coinbase also stated that the affected users will reimburse.
Despite the reimbursement promises, Wang Coinbase called on the potential exposure of the home addresses of users and to treat IDs issued by the government as a matter of personal safety, which is worth “much more than loss of funds”.
Remediation costs up to $ 400 million
Zachxbt has in recent months attributed more than $ 300 million In annualized Coinbase user losses as comparable social engineering activities, of which many of them Concerning imitation, seed grass extraction and the diversion of the fund.
In a corresponding form 8-K submit With the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on 15 May, Coinbase announced that it still assesses the total financial consequences of the security course.
Based on the current data, the provisional estimates of the company place the remediation costs and voluntary customer allowances between $ 180 million and $ 400 million.
Moreover, Coinbase repeated in the document that it would not pay the ransom by the attackers. The company stated that it is planning to pursue all legal ways against the persons responsible for the attack and continues his investigation into the full scope of the incident.