Coinbase, Bithumb and South Korean Financial Firms Report Data Leaks

Four financial and cryptocurrency firms have experienced data security breaches with the details of customers and internal business information, namely Coinbase, Bithumb, Mirae Asset Global Investments, and Daishin Securities. As per the report by Reuters, three of those attacks took place in South Korea on October 28. At the same time, Coinbase disclosed independently that user data was breached through a third-party analytics firm called Amplitude. As stated by Coinbase, its systems were not hacked after claims were made about some customer data being exposed. 

Daishin Securities Identifies Thousands of Affected Customers Following Server Attack

As per the report, the exchange explained that the event happened at Amplitude, which is an outside analytics provider for Coinbase and other firms. According to Coinbase Support, the data exposed included a small amount of customer contact data, along with other clients of Amplitude. No specific numbers regarding how many Coinbase customers were impacted have been revealed by the company, nor is there a comprehensive list of what data has been leaked. Nonetheless, Coinbase claimed that no customer money has been compromised.

These affected customers have been informed through email, based on the relevant legal requirements. This latest security breach comes after a similar attack suffered by Foundation, the company behind the Bitcoin hardware wallet, earlier this week. In this attack, the Cloudflare API keys were compromised, and phishing emails were sent from official company domains. However, Foundation’s Passport devices and customer funds were safe. 

Bithumb, a cryptocurrency exchange based in South Korea, reported that there was an intrusion by an outside entity into its internal mobile groupware application that is used by employees for work communication purposes. This breach was discovered on October 27 and immediately reported to the Korea Internet & Security Agency and the Personal Information Protection Commission. 

Out of the four cases, the one from Daishin Securities is the most transparent in terms of the number of customers affected. The South Korean broker announced that the personal and credit data of 38,490 customers had been compromised after hackers attacked a server linked to its remote account opening service.

The detection of the strange activity took place on October 17, after which it blocked the IP addresses of the hackers and reported the attack to financial regulatory authorities. In collaboration with the Financial Security Institute, Daishin reviewed around 60,000 requests posed in the form of traffic for a service for ten days until the attack was confirmed on October 26.