Worlds popular Crypto Exchange Coinbase hacked, employee data stolen.

Coinbase is one of the world’s popular cryptocurrency exchanges. The crypto exchange was recently targeted in a sophisticated cyberattack that appears to have been conducted by the same threat group that targeted Twilio, Cloudflare and many others last year.

Coinbase said that it was targeted by the so-called "Oktapus" hackers. The hackers that stole the login credentials of one it's employee in an attempt to remotely gain access to the company's systems. The hackers who reportedly hit more than 130 organizations last year and stole the credentials of almost 10,000 employees are still targeting several tech and video game companies, according to Crowdstrike security report.

An unknown threat actor went to great lengths to try and compromise the internal systems belonging to one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency exchange platforms using a phishing attack. While the attackers ultimately succeeded in breaching the system, they were ousted before being allowed to cause any serious harm. According to Coinbase, customer funds, as well as customer data, are all safe and sound.

The attacker had initially sent out five phishing SMS messages to Coinbase employees, asking them to log into their company accounts urgently and read an important message. The messages contained a link that impersonated the Coinbase corporate login page, but was in fact nothing more than a malicious landing page designed to steal sensitive data.

Coinbase had confirmed and said, "Fortunately, Coin base's cyber controls prevented the attacker from gaining direct system access and prevented any loss of funds or compromise of customer information. Only a limited amount of data from our corporate directory was exposed."

Coinbase had confirmed that no customer data was accessed as per company’s chief information security officer, Jeff Lunglhofer.

So what do we learn from the Coinbase data breach?

Here are a few effective tips to learn and apply for cyber security threat defenders.

• Never speak to an unknown or suspicious person. You should validate the identity of the person you are speaking to.
• Never login by clicking on links in messages. You should know where to go yourself, without needing “help” from a message that could have come from anywhere.
• Never follow blindly IT advice from people who call you. 
• Never install software on the say-so of an IT staffer you haven’t verified.
• Never reply to a message or call if it is suspicious. 
• Always report suspicious events and incidents to your IT or Security operations team as soon as you can.

 
If you're interested in improving your organization's cybersecurity and safeguarding your organization against a data breach, you can get started with with our Managed Threat Detection & Response service. Contact us today to learn more about our service and how we can help your organization stay ahead of today's sophisticated cyber threats.