CoinGecko has confirmed that its third-party email provider, GetResponse, experienced a data breach on June 5, leading to over 19 million users’ data exploitation.
According to CoinGecko’s announcement on June 7, the security vulnerability was the result of a compromised employee account:
“An attacker had compromised a GetResponse employee’s account, leading to a breach. We received confirmation from the GetResponse team on 6 June 2024, at 11:58 AM UTC, that a data breach had occurred.”
Users’ names, email addresses, IP addresses, email open locations, and other metadata, including subscription plans and sign-up dates, comprise the compromised data.
User accounts and credentials on CoinGecko are currently uncompromised and secure.
More than 23,000 fraudulent emails
CoinGecko reported that the perpetrator could send 23,723 phishing emails, although their primary email domain was not at risk.
“The attacker exported 1,916,596 contacts from CoinGecko’s GetResponse account and sent phishing emails to 23,723 emails from another GetResponse client’s account (alj.associates).”
Hackers employ phishing attacks to obtain sensitive information, such as private keys for crypto wallets. The objective of address poisoning scams and other phishing attacks is to deceive investors into transferring funds to a fraudulent address that resembles an address with which they have previously interacted.
According to Hakan Unal, a senior blockchain scientist at on-chain security firm Cyvers, users should verify the authenticity of emails and implement two-factor authentication (2FA) on crypto platforms to protect themselves from fraud attacks. He disclosed to Cointelegraph:
“The immediate concern is the risk posed to individuals who might receive these compromised emails. To stay safe, users should verify the authenticity of such emails and enable multifactor authentication on all crypto accounts.”
Private key and data breaches – the primary cause of crypto hacks
The most significant cause of cryptocurrency-related violations is the leakage of personal data and private keys, as exploiters focus on the easiest targets rather than attempting to penetrate more intricate protocols.
According to Merkle Science’s 2024 HackHub report, private key breaches resulted in the loss of over 55% of the digital assets that were hacked in 2023.
Mriganka Pattnaik, co-founder and CEO of Merkle Science, a crypto risk and intelligence platform, maintains that private critical breaches are the most significant vulnerability in the crypto space. He disclosed:
“The biggest security concern right now is the rapid increase in losses due to private key leaks… hackers may be looking for easier targets that require less technical knowledge to exploit, such as stealing private keys.”
