Coinbase

I received a note from a friend over the weekend letting me know that she hadn't followed up with me sooner after our coffee a week ago because her Coinbase account had been targeted for an attack. Turns out another well known blogger in the digital currency space had also been targeted and wrote about it, and has yet to get a satisfactory resolution to the breach, which was perpetrated through a Verizon cellular account. All this is a reminder that the digital currency space is INDEED the future, and we believe in it fully, but it still is wild and wooly out there. If you have started to dip your toes into the digital currency space for yourself or your investors and have a digital wallet/s, make sure to read the piece below with tips to protect yourself from the same. And it's worth noting that Cody Brown, referenced in the piece below, was notified it may be several weeks before he would hear back from Coinbase on the breach. No coincidence, because the exchange has added 400,000 new accounts in the last 30 days and clearly is not staffed up to deal with the explosion of interest in digital currencies of late.

(Cindy Taylor/Publisher)

"I read Cody Brown’s blog post about getting hacked on Thursday of last week. I feel very badly for Cody and plan to send him some BTC once I get access back to my account. His post helped me avoid his fate.

I woke up Friday morning (central european summer time) and saw a bunch of emails in my inbox suggesting that suspicious activities were happening in my personal gmail account, my mobile phone account, and my two factor service.

I immediately thought “that’s the same attack pattern that Cody wrote about” and I was able to get to Coinbase and have them lock down my account immediately. The good news is nothing appears to have been taken from my Coinbase account although I don’t currently have access to it right now and thankfully nobody else does either.

Without getting into the specifics, I would like to tell everyone five things I learned from this awful experience:

  1. Call your cell phone provider and put a “do not port under any circumstances” hold on your phone number. I did this about six months ago and I think it may have saved me. It is way too easy to port a phone number and once a hacker has your number, they have access to two factor codes coming via SMS.
  2. Put two factor on everything you can. I did not have it on my old and dormant gmail account which is partially why it was vulnerable. Obviously I have it on there now...."
See Full Article with Additional Digital Wallet Security Suggestions at AVC.com