The Binance CEO was initially dismissive of claims of losses resulting from a 3Comma API key leak earlier this month; now, he advises disabling 3Comma API keys.
On December 28, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) warned his 8 million Twitter followers that he is “reasonably certain” that API key leaks are occurring at the cryptocurrency trade management platform.
CZ’s disclosure came after an incident on December 9 in which Binance cancelled the account of a user who had complained about losing funds the day before. According to that user, a leaked API key associated with 3Commas was used “to make trades on low cap coins to push up the price to profit.” Binance refused to compensate the user. CZ stated on Twitter that the loss was unverifiable and that if the company compensated for such losses, “we will just be paying for users to lose their API keys.”
On December 11, 3Commas CEO Yuriy Sorokin claimed on the company blog that fake screenshots of the company’s lax security and employees stealing API keys were circulating on Twitter and YouTube. “The person who created the screenshots did a nice job with an HTML editor, but they made a few key mistakes that easily prove their claims are fake,” Sorokin said in an in-depth technical analysis of the images. We’ll go over them point by point.”
In late October, 3Commas experienced its first security breach. In response to reports from users of unauthorized trades of trading pairs with the DMG coin on FTX at the time, the still-operational FTX exchange issued a security alert. 3Commas and FTX determined that the trades were carried out by hackers using 3Commas accounts. However, according to the 3Commas blog, “the API keys were obtained from sources other than 3Commas.”
