Thousands of addresses would be compromised and available to potential hackers and scammers. Binance encouraged its users to change the e-mails registered on the platform.
The BitMEX exchange, which is concentrated on products derived from Bitcoin, acknowledged on Friday, November 1st, that it had leaked personal data of thousands of users of the platform after sending an update e-mail with information about people using the platform.
In the message, the company indicates that it has acted with immediacy to contain the problem and, without further details, assures that it is taking steps to understand the scope of the situation. It also says that it is doing everything possible to identify the root cause of the failure and will contact the users affected by the problem.
Twitter user Matt (@vanalli) suspects that BitMEX employees made a mistake sending mass e-mails, forgetting to place the recipients of the e-mail newsletter in a hidden copy, thus compromising the security of the users of the platform, whose data are now exposed.
This Twitter user does not understand how that can be happening. He wonders if they are sending their e-mails to customers manually, or if they are dealing with normal e-mails without CRM or third party software. He says that he cannot even imagine how they are handling the data of users.
The alleged error incurred by the P2P cryptocurrency trading platform means that anyone can see the e-mail addresses of all the recipients. This represents a problem for users, considering that they could be used by hackers and scammers who already know that those addresses are used to be logged on the BitMEX platform.
Jake Chervinsky, a cryptocurrency lawyer, said in a Twitter message that BitMEX has just annoyed its users in the most scandalously incompetent way that anyone can ever imagine: forgetting to use a hidden copy in a mass e-mail. This must-have led many of the affected users to clean their desktops.
Some users have tweeted screenshots of the e-mailing lists received, whilst others recommend that users change their e-mail accounts as their addresses are compromised. The exchange house Binance encouraged its users to change their e-mails, although it did not explain whether this was due to what had happened with BitMEX.
A similar situation occurred last July when a report by the security researchers of the network-focused website vpnMentor warned of a leak of personal data of users of the YouHodler-backed cryptocurrency lending platform. However, at that time the company reported that the leak was not directly related to its database, and thus these records did not contain confidential information and no one was affected.
In the month of August, the hackers attacked Binance and demanded from the cryptocurrency exchange 300 bitcoins in exchange for retaining 10,000 photos with the know your customer (KYC) data of the users of that platform. These kinds of situations make the users of these services skeptical about those that are supposed to be providing them with security. This also forces the company to incur the problem to struggle in order to keep customers with them.
By Willmen Blanco
