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

The article keeps saying overseas employees or contractors, but isn't more specific on who Coinbase entrusted with this sensitive customer PII.

The bottom line is Coinbase didn't adequately secure sensitive customer information, and it was leaked.

Not, "Gosh, 'overseas' people, what can ya do?"

It's probably hard to keep call-center workers bribe-proof.

Let me add to your statement. It is hard to keep call center workers bribe-proof WHEN they are paid peanuts AND they are working for a company that is in an extremely high risk business of managing crypto.

correct, but what's the alternative? they're paid peanuts because it's not exactly the kind of job you ever pay out the wazoo for. the only thing that comes to mind if I'm Brian Armstrong is going all in on AI bots that can get to 90% of the way there (maybe 95%) and then have domestic based humans that are paid more with (presumably) a less probability of being bribed. but realistically, the only way to stop something like this is going 100% AI bots but then that comes at the expense of customer satisfaction, and also bots that are exploitable through prompt manipulation.

alternatively limit the roles and what the offshore people are able to do, but then any escalation means domestic people, which brings us back to "well at that point just use AI to automate easy tasks"

> what's the alternative?

Small set of privileged employees who work from the home office and are compensated to match. If an issue requires their attention, it takes time to resolve. But it's resolved securely. In essence, what Google does.

Alternative is the banking model. Low-cost customer service massively empowered and just eat the costs of breaches as they come.

What Google does is “don’t resolve shit”. When I was a Google Fi customer paying $60-80/mo, so more than the vast majority of Google users, their customer support was completely useless (but at least polite, I’ll give them that). They did take their sweet time, kept promising to call me back after each fruitless call I initiated but didn’t, so you’re right about “it takes time to resolve” I guess.

My multiple banks’ customer service is meh but they do resolve problems and as far as I can tell, haven’t leaked any of my stuff yet in decades. That you think “what Google does” is better than “the banking model” is amusing.