Comment by neilv
14 hours ago
The article keeps saying overseas employees or contractors, but isn't more specific on who Coinbase entrusted with this sensitive customer PII.
The bottom line is Coinbase didn't adequately secure sensitive customer information, and it was leaked.
Not, "Gosh, 'overseas' people, what can ya do?"
How can customer support operate without knowing anything about the customer?
You know how your bank asks you to verify details when you call?
Without the right details the customer support people don’t get entry into the customers account details.
Banks have been doing this for 30+ years..
This also wouldn't be particularly difficult to implement.
Which is such a lame and flawed mechanism to avoid letting them access anyone's data. I mean what are you even trying to prove here? That banks care about customer's security when they can't even implement a secure 2FA which is not just an unencrypted text message
“Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank, but give a man a bank, and he can rob the world.”
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CS can validate without knowing the details, the same way you don't enter a password and then check to see if that matches the password in the system.
The fact that they keep blaming overseas customer support is pure blame shifting - you still hired someone and gave them access to all this data, Coinbase!
We don’t know if they had access to everything. They got data for “less than 1% of monthly transacting customers”.
A shared or hashed secret would do it.
Plenty of exchanges don't know their customers, and in fact that is how they get their customers.
No. Coinbase deals with fiat money, therefore subject to AML and KYC regulations.
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Isn't the whole point of crypto to keep PII out of it completely? If not, what is all this non-sense for exactly, other than the typical goals of pyramid schemes?
The main point of crypto IMO is to have a large-denomination bearer asset.
This is overlooked most places but if you examine around the time the FATF finally pretty much eliminated bearer bonds, bearer stocks, and large bank notes was exactly the time crypto really took off.
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Coinbase is a bridge between digital currencies and the traditional world.
Unfortunately government regulation does not make that possible for exchanges. It also is not the point of crypto.
Not if you are dealing with a regulated exchange that facilitates fiat money transactions.
You can receive crypto privately to your own wallet without sharing PII, without any exchange.
The PII is required by governments, to convert crypto money into real money.
It's simple. They want to centralize crypto and dickheads like armstrong are happy to be in line to make that happen. Just look at tether, what's the point of it? It's nothing but a front for inflating the price of bitcoin. It has NEVER been audited and has been found to NOT have any USD backing at all
It's probably hard to keep call-center workers bribe-proof.
Yes, but I do think an organization like Coinbase or a cell phone carrier - which are extreme targets of fraud - have an obligation to recognize that their employees are targets and implement greater security measures than most organizations. Maybe Coinbase should even pay higher wages and use onshore customer service agents.
Well, it sounds like they do implement greater security measures than most organizations.
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You can take the Google approach of basically not empowering the agents at all. It's not worth trying to social engineer Google CS, because they can't do anything anyway.
Coinbase has the same approach. It's a miracle that ransomware operators got in touch with Coinbase support at all.
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One step would be not to locate all of the call centers in countries where “stealing money from elderly Americans” is a noticeable part of their GDP.
You are writing this as if you know what countries Coinbase's call centers are located in and the role of organized crime in their economies, but you don't actually know either of those things.
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You mean like in the USA?
> ...bribed AT&T employees at a call center in Bothell, Washington, to "use their network credentials and exceed their authorized access to AT&T's computers to submit large numbers of fraudulent and unauthorized unlock requests on behalf of the conspiracy and to install malware and unauthorized hardware on AT&T's systems," according to the indictment.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/att-employees-bribed-1m-unlo...
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Call center workers who have access PII and financial abilities should probably be vetted a little bit better.
How are you going to vet people to find out if they're vulnerable to bribery? Offer them a bribe during their probationary period, during which they only have access to fake customer data?
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Let me add to your statement. It is hard to keep call center workers bribe-proof WHEN they are paid peanuts AND they are working for a company that is in an extremely high risk business of managing crypto.
correct, but what's the alternative? they're paid peanuts because it's not exactly the kind of job you ever pay out the wazoo for. the only thing that comes to mind if I'm Brian Armstrong is going all in on AI bots that can get to 90% of the way there (maybe 95%) and then have domestic based humans that are paid more with (presumably) a less probability of being bribed. but realistically, the only way to stop something like this is going 100% AI bots but then that comes at the expense of customer satisfaction, and also bots that are exploitable through prompt manipulation.
alternatively limit the roles and what the offshore people are able to do, but then any escalation means domestic people, which brings us back to "well at that point just use AI to automate easy tasks"
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It's hard to keep most people bribe proof.
It’s not hard, it’s expensive.
Yes but you can not give them a SQL prompt. Rate limiting account queries per CSR is a common mitigation measure.
Pretty sure all the Big Banks use call centers and manage to avoid this.
They haven't:
https://www.americanbanker.com/news/call-centers-and-bank-br... "Call centers and bank branches are major fraud liabilities"
https://www.bai.org/banking-strategies/beating-crooks-at-cal... "Aite Group’s findings that 61 percent of fraud can be traced back to the [call] center are equally concerning, as is its prediction that contact center fraud loss will double by 2020."
> Coinbase didn't adequately secure sensitive customer information, and it was leaked
Practically every company has someone with credentials who is in some combination of debt, a damningly-adulterous relationship, a damningly-illegal substance relationship and/or feels underappreciated or slighted compensationwise. The question is generally how much it costs.
Which is exactly why insider threats should be explored as a threat-model and mitigated to make the blast radius as small as possible via rate PII sanitization, access controls, access monitoring, rate limiting, etc.
The odds are already against their future viability after a breach like this and if they're fumbling the response this bad it really doesn't bode well for them.
They would have been better off not even bringing up their location if they weren't going to be transparent.
Question that needs to be answered if they were prosecuted. Losing your job but getting to keep the bribe just means it will still happen.
They are probably used as scapegoats and didn't even leak the stuff. Crypto companies tend to do that.
Bribes are one thing, but threats could also happen. This is a big part of the reason why I absolutely hate entities that think residential addresses should be public record.
This is a precedent to Coinbase employees getting physical threats at their door just because e.g. some voter registration, utility company, bank, credit card, or court record decided to release their name and addresses on the internet. People could show up at some Coinbase software engineers' apartment doors with guns demanding they send BTC to arbitrary addresses.
AFAICT it's impractical to keep residential addresses 100% private/secure - too many ways to get an address from any number of companies, organizations and governments that collect it for various reasons.
Plus numerous ways to infer your address from other data sources, including apps that grab GPS on friends' cellphones when they visit, etc.
Finally, shutting down paid data brokers seems virtually impossible in practice, which means anybody googling you can pay $20 and get everything.
Remember, the issue isn't lazy goodguys but even slightly motivated badguys, who then use third party scripts to do the data collection.
Man, I hate how Wisconsin makes the data not only public, but free.
I bought a house here after a long time out of country and the first year all I got for mail was scam bullshit. Loads of it.
> shutting down paid data brokers seems virtually impossible in practice
Just jail them. Make it a felony to release someone's PII without their written consent, and make data brokers illegal to begin with.
> numerous ways to infer your address from other data sources, including apps that grab GPS on friends' cellphones when they visit
These are not the main vector of transmission of personal information. Yes, Meta could probably do some graph analysis and infer this, but it's a lot of work, and their data leaks are rare in comparison to all the other companies, financial institutions, and governmental organizations, that freely post residential addresses on the internet and to data brokers for the world to Google.
> companies, organizations and governments that collect it for various reasons
KYC requiring addresses should be banned. Companies should not collect a residential address.
This is a feature of bitcoin not a bug.
If you sling code for cryptocurrency you and your loved ones are "in the game" now.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20qee5030do
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It's not surprising. Coinbase is nothing but a money laundering exchange, just like every other sketchy crypto exchange out there. They were also engaged in pump and dump of various altcoins
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