Key Takeaways
- Bitfinex’s CTO Paolo Ardoino said recent hacking claims made by the group Fsociety were “fake”;
- Only a portion of the alleged leaked data matched Bitfinex’s records, suggesting the data could have been sourced from previous breaches;
- The hacking claims might be part of a promotional strategy for a cybersecurity tool.
Paolo Ardoino, the Chief Technology Officer of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, recently responded to claims by a hacking group called Fsociety that they had infiltrated Bitfinex’s database and leaked thousands of customer emails and passwords.
Ardoino expressed doubts about the authenticity of these allegations in a statement released on X on May 4, saying that the evidence “seems fake.”
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He explained that in data breaches, ransom demands are typically made through official channels, but Bitfinex did not receive such demands.
Further analysis by Bitfinex showed that out of the 22,500 email and password records allegedly leaked, only 5,000 were associated with actual Bitfinex users.
In addition, Ardoino suggested that the leaked data might have been aggregated from previous breaches on different platforms, highlighting a common problem where users reuse the same email and passwords across multiple sites. This makes it difficult to pinpoint the exact source of a data leak.
The CTO also shared insights from a security researcher who speculated that the hacking claim could be a promotion of a data retrieval tool. According to the researcher, the alleged breach was possibly staged as a marketing technique:
So by creating a buzz about successfully hacking well-known companies / a university, it is an advertisement of how good their tool is and others should buy it so they can make millions of dollars by using it to exploit companies using this tool.
Ardoino reassured users that their funds are secure and no evidence of a breach has been detected to date.
In other related news, Bitfinex analysts have recently stated that they anticipated a two-month period of price consolidation for Bitcoin.
Having completed a Master’s degree in Economics, Politics, and Cultures of the East Asia region, Aaron has written scientific papers analyzing the differences between Western and Collective forms of capitalism in the post-World War II era.
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