Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency exchange, had a minor security breach earlier this week due to a phishing assault on one of its customer service personnel.
Although the problem has been fixed, such attacks highlight the ongoing attacks by bad actors on significant crypto infrastructures such as trading exchanges.
Bitfinex Claims That User Data Is Still Intact And Secure
Bitfinex stated in a blog post on November 4 that hackers carried out a phishing attempt on a customer service agent; nonetheless, the disastrous venture earned no profits.
The targeted agent, according to the exchange, lacked senior permission and could only access supporting tools and helpdesk tickets.
As a result, the hackers gained no valuable data from their attack because they could only access a small area of the Bitfinex customer support forums, which contained “partial, incomplete, and stale information.”
According to Bitfinex, none of its operational systems were impacted, nor was any of its server, wallet, or database infrastructure hacked. Furthermore, all customer assets remained safe and untouched, and were never available to the hackers.
However, certain accounts were hit by this attack, according to Bitfinex, and these accounts were either empty or non-functional. Nonetheless, the exchange has announced that it will notify the owners of the impacted accounts.
Bitfinex said it has alerted law enforcement and will use its tight ties with these organizations to ensure the hackers are apprehended and prosecuted.
Bitfinex, founded in 2012, is one of the oldest exchanges, with 3 million active users. The trading platform, which is based in Hong Kong, services users from 52 countries across the world.
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Crypto Exchanges Are Still Being Targeted
As previously noted, cryptocurrency exchanges are understandably popular targets for hackers, given the massive quantity of assets these trading platforms contain at any given time.
According to Dunmanu, Upbit’s operator, the South Korean exchange detected over 160,000 hacking attempts on its infrastructure in H1 2023. This is more than quadruple the amount of attacks experienced by the exchange in the first half of 2022.
While Upbit and Bitfinex may have escaped these attacks “unharmed,” other exchanges have experienced big losses as a result of these criminal actors.
In April, the Bitrue exchange, which has a daily trading volume of $1 billion, was hacked, resulting in the loss of around $23 million in digital assets.
Six months later, Hong Kong-based CoinEx suffered the greatest robbery on a centralized crypto exchange in 2023, when hackers stole $55.5 million in cryptocurrencies from the platform’s hot wallets. These attacks highlight the ongoing need for security systems in the crypto domain to be improved.
