Coinbase in a hacking scare as exchange sends emails in error

In an early article, I warned about how the ease of using wallets provided by crypto exchanges can lull you into a false sense of security. This is because it seems these days large scale crypto-heists targeting exchanges are on the rise. Users of the very popular platform Coinbase were recently reminded of this fact as they went into panic mode after they received scary emails from the platform.

Yesterday, from 1:45pm PST to 3:07pm PST, Coinbase sent roughly 125,000 customers erroneous notifications that their 2FA settings had changed.

Our teams immediately recognized the problem and worked as quickly as possible to ensure these erroneous notifications were stopped and the underlying issue fixed.

We’re laser focused on building trust and security into the crypto community so that the open financial system we all want is a reality. We recognize that issues like this can hurt that trust.

We will continue to work to gain back the trust of every one of our customers who was impacted by those notifications.

Coinbase’s full statement on the incident.

A select number of people who use the platform were shocked to receive an email that said their 2Factor Authentication settings had been changed. This is despite them not effecting the change or even signing into the platform at the given time. This seemed to suggest that there had been a serious breach of security. Given the fact that just last week a number of Coinbase users lost their crypto the recipients of this email went understandably went into a frenzy.

A lot of Zimbabwean crypto-traders also use Coinbase but it doesn’t seem like anyone received this concerning email. Despite the worry, those who did receive the email will get US$100 worth of free crypto by way of an apology from Coinbase.

In this case, this was a false alarm. However, it serves to underscore the point of my earlier article. We are seeing large scale crypto-heists these days as sophisticated hackers target exchanges. If you have crypto you don’t intend to move anytime soon you are better of considering an offline wallet.