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

Summary

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesCoinbase on Thursday reported that cybercriminals bribed overseas support agents to steal customer data to use in social engineering attacks. The incident may cost Coinbase up to $400 million to fix, the company estimated.The crypto exchange operator received an email on May 11 from someone claiming they obtained information about certain Coinbase customer accounts as well as other internal Coinbase documentation, including materials relating to customer service and account management systems, Coinbase reported in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.The company's shares were down more than 6% in morning trading.The email demanded money in exchange for not publicly disclosing the information, but Coinbase says it has not paid the demand and is cooperating with law enforcement on the investigation of the incident.Although passwords and private keys were not compromised, affected data included sensitive data such as names, addresses, phone numbers and emails; masked bank account numbers and identifiers as well as the last four digits of Social Security numbers; government ID images and account balances, the company said."Cyber criminals bribed and recruited a group of rogue overseas support agents to steal Coinbase customer data to facilitate social engineering attacks," the company said in a blog post. "These insiders abused their access to customer support systems to steal the account data for a small subset of customers. No passwords, private keys, or funds were exposed and Coinbase Prime accounts are untouched. We will reimburse customers who were tricked into sending funds to the attacker."Coinbase had detected the breach independently in previous months, per the filing. It immediately terminated the employees involved, warned customers whose information may have been accessed and enhanced its fraud monitoring protections.The threat actor paid overseas contractors and employees in support rolls to obtain the informat...