MFA Glitch Leads to 6K+ Coinbase Customers Getting Robbed

guest · Oct 3, 2021

MFA Glitch Leads to 6K+ Coinbase Customers Getting Robbed
Coinbase suspects phishing led to attackers getting personal details needed to access wallets
October 1, 2021
https://threatpost.com/mfa-glitch-coinbase-customers-robbery/175290/

The accounts of at least 6,000 Coinbase customers were robbed of funds after attackers bypassed the cryptocurrency exchange’s multi-factor authentication (MFA).
According to a notification letter (PDF) Coinbase sent to affected customers and filed with the California state Attorney General’s office, the theft happened between March and May 20, 2021.

The attacker(s) used a flaw in Coinbase’s account recovery process to seize the SMS two-factor authentication tokens needed to break into customers’ accounts and transfer funds to crypto wallets unassociated with Coinbase.
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In order to pull it off, the culprits first needed access to victims’ email addresses, passwords, phone numbers and personal email inboxes.

Coinbase noted that such information is often gleaned through phishing attacks or other social engineering techniques that trick victims into disclosing their login credentials.
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Coinbase Phishing Attacks Are Rising
In fact, earlier this week, on Monday, Coinbase warned that phishing attacks are on the rise, both in terms of volume and success rates. Between April and early May 2021, its security team saw a “significant uptick” in Coinbase-branded phishing messages that targeted users of a range of commonly used email service providers: attacks that “demonstrated a higher degree of success” at bypassing spam filters of certain older email services.

Coinbase provided samples of the phishing attacks its team has seen, including the ones shown below: [...]
SMS 2FA Authentication Flaw
Coinbase didn’t go into detail about the flaw: It only said that as soon as it learned about the issue, it “updated our SMS Account Recovery protocols to prevent any further bypassing of that authentication process.”
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Rasheed187 · Oct 10, 2021

Wait a minute, why won't they release info about the SMS 2FA Authentication Flaw, this is the most interesting and shocking part. Also, it's time to ditch SMS based 2FA and switch to authenticator apps, eventhough it's not completely clear to me why these apps are much more safer, I'm still trying to figure this out. I would rather see something like Intel Online Connect, which is baked in security, no need for a third party app.

https://betanews.com/2017/10/26/intel-online-connect/

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MFA Glitch Leads to 6K+ Coinbase Customers Getting Robbed

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