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

Coinbase not only leaked your full name and address, they also gave up your balances, your transaction history, and images of your government identification.

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.

Until now, your best defense secrecy. Never talk about crypto in public in any way that could be traced to your real-world identity.

Thanks to Coinbase that defense is now gone.

The bad guys can see who has ever had a significant balance on Coinbase (even if they don't right now), whether that balance was sold for cash and how much, or if you've ever transferred tokens off the exchange to a self-custody wallet.

Now the bad guys know who's worth kidnapping for ransom and where you live. For most people, a Google search of your name and home address turns up the names of family members who would would also be lucrative targets for kidnapping and threats of violence.

Coinbase will never be forced to reimburse all the damage they've done because the true cost would bankrupt the company.

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 encouragement to go assault people in their homes or kidnap families... just confusion.

Crypto? It's wild, and people think it's wild.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/florida-teens-kidnap-las-vegas-20...

This story keeps repeating. Maybe we should try it and see if it works as a deterrent.

The distinguishing parts are things you don't want: easily corrupted, grifted, cheated and otherwise duped.

That's true, finding someone with 10k is not as easy as picking a person at random, but it is as easy as driving to the right parking lot and picking a person at random.

Sounds like an appendix.

This is due to US Government KYC laws that forced Coinbase to associate government identification with all accounts. No crypto company required ID until they were forced to.

Coinbase is the entity that set up this dangerous system.

Coinbase did it because it was cheap for them, not because they were being trustworthy custodians of information that put their customers at risk.

Sure, yes, obviously every company's employees and contractors are vulnerable to bribes and blackmail. That's why a trustworthy, competent custodian would establish systems and controls to prevent bribed and blackmailed insiders from mass-exfiltrating information that could get their customers killed.

The fact that other companies manage to be trustworthy, competent custodians while Coinbase doesn't is not the fault of KYC.

Also, people do point guns in people’s faces and force them to pay them via Venmo or Cashapp. Google ‘Venmo robbery’ or ‘cashapp robbery’ for plenty of examples. Pointing a gun in someone’s face for $4M in crypto is a lot more lucrative.

Essentially you cannot trust Coinbase IMO, might move the few hundred dollars of BTC out of there :-)

Someone, someone at that company should be going to prison for negligence

With crypto, no bank or other middleman involved, it's like stealing physical cash/gold/diamonds from someone, if you know they have it in their possession, so violence can be a lot more successful at coercing a change of possession.

This is the crypto industry, who make the discrepancy between Theranos' claims and practice look conservative.

Wealth status is often very well known for public figures and entrepreneurs. People are driving around in $200k cars.

Is it due to the liquidity of cryptocurrencies that $5 wrench attacks work better?

... and save the data in US cloud where everybody can access it.

It is really funny how FAANG can get away with data colkection in spite of GDPR.

That's not how capitalism works. /s

Also, a decent proportion of crypto-millionaires came by their riches in... not entirely above-board ways (in particular, securities fraud; all those pump and dump scamcoins are paying off for _someone_), and may be reluctant to involve the authorities. And the crypto industry as a whole is unusually comfortable with extortion; hacked crypto companies paying a kind of bounty to hackers to get the rest of the funds back is a common thing.

That is simply not going to happen.

This is actually more difficult than it sounds. Most banks and crypto exchanges won't allow a person to make meaningfully large crypto transactions without some account history.

Neither the dollar or crypto are anything but social illusions, neither have an inherent right to exist.

It’s just people manipulating people. Such an intellectually dishonest forum to sit here and discuss meaningless layers of obfuscation.

The most important thing to any individual is enough other humans around their own life isn’t so hard. Specific humans, like those on this forum, are not essential.

You all can bleat on as hard as you want about the existence of crypto but it’s not an evenly distributed belief. And your individual value is non existent to the majority on the planet. No reason to prop up your hallucinations

You'd be lucky to complete this in less than a week.

> Coinbase employs a range of technical and organizational measures to defeat efforts to intercept, surveil, or otherwise access without authorization data in transit. For instance, Coinbase encrypts all confidential data transfers to prevent interception or tampering of that data by unauthorized third parties.

Coinbase does business in the EU and thus, already has to comply with the GDPR. Moreover, the US also requires safeguards for sensitive customer information by financial services companies.

Someone else made a great mention though: Coinbase didn't just serve the US. For the vast majority of countries these amounts are more than the yearly disposable income of a typical household. From that angle the numbers in the stories make a bit more sense.