I have recordings proving Coinbase knew about breach months before disclosure

https://jonathanclark.com/posts/coinbase-breach-timeline.html

by jclarkcom • 8 months ago

685 212 8 months ago

jclarkcom13• 8 months ago

In January 2025, I was targeted by scammers who knew my exact Bitcoin balance, SSN, DL, and other private Coinbase account details. I immediately reported this to Coinbase's Head of Trust & Safety with recordings and technical evidence. Despite repeated follow-ups asking how attackers had my data, Coinbase went silent for 4 months. They only disclosed the breach in May after attackers demanded $20M ransom. The breach involved overseas contractors at TaskUs being bribed for customer data. This article documents the timeline with emails, recordings, and evidence showing Coinbase was aware of the breach months before their official "discovery" date.

scottiebarnes• 8 months ago

Are you going to be suing?

jclarkcom13• 8 months ago

I would consider it but I'm not sure what my options are on this.

nightpool4• 8 months ago

You mentioned that the DKIM headers "passed validation for coinbase.com". How could that have been possible, if the email was a phishing email? I'm not sure I understood that part, especially because you didn't provide any examples of the header data you received from the attacker.

Cantinflas• 8 months ago

Yeah this is very confusing for me too, how could the attackers create a valid DKIM signature for coinbase.com? Either there is a huge misconfiguration or it's not possible. Am I missing something?

s5ma6n• 8 months ago

Thanks for sharing it, however I have an unrelated comment.

Maybe I am in minority here but just wanted to provide this feedback: The background animation of the blog page is really distracting and making it difficult to focus on the actual content.

jmclnx• 8 months ago

Isn't there a new law from the Biden era that forces a company disclose breaches to their customers and the SEC within a few weeks ?

If so and if the US had a sane administration maybe, this would be acted upon, but these days, anything goes as long as you 'donate' to the ballroom.

jclarkcom13• 8 months ago

Yes, I did briefly touch on that in the article. "SEC rules require timely reporting of material cybersecurity incidents."

Looking into this more now I see SEC Rule requiring disclosure within 4 business days of determining a cybersecurity incident is "material"

There is a big list of SEC violations as a result: 1. Late Disclosure (Item 1.05) If materiality was determinable in January → 4-day rule violated Penalty: Fines, enforcement actions

2. Misleading Statements/Omissions (Rule 10b-5) Any public statements about security between Jan-May could be problematic Omitting known material risks = securities fraud

3. Inadequate Internal Controls (SOX) Failure to properly investigate and escalate user reports Inadequate breach detection systems

4. Failure to Maintain Adequate Disclosure Controls My report should have triggered disclosure review Going silent suggests broken escalation process

divvvyy• 8 months ago

Wild tale, but very annoying that he wrote it with an AI. It's horribly jarring to read.

Grimblewald4• 8 months ago

How do you know?

I'm not trying to be recalcitrant, rather I am genuinly curious. The reason I ask is that no one talks like a LLM, but LLMs do talk like someone. LLMs learned to mimic human speech patterns, and some unlucky soul(s) out there have had their voice stolen. Earlier versions of LLMs of LLMs that more closely followed the pattern and structure of a wikipedia entry were mimicking a style that that was based of someone elses style and given some wiki users had prolific levels of contributions, much of their naturally generated text would register as highly likely to be "AI" via those bullshit ai detector tools.

So, given what we know of LLMs (transformers at least) at this stage it seems more likely to me that current speech patterns again are mimicry of someones style rather than an organically grown/developed thing that is personal to the LLM.

gmzamz• 8 months ago

Looks like AI to me too. Em dashes (albeit nonstandard) and the ‘it’s not just x, it’s y’ ending phrases were everywhere. Harder to put into words but there’s a sense of grandiosity in the article too.

Not saying the article is bad, it seems pretty good. Just that there are indications

drabbiticus• 8 months ago

Just chiming in here - any time I've written something online that considers things from multiple angles or presents more detailed analysis, the liklihood that someone will ask if I just used ChatGPT go way up. I worry that people have gotten really used to short, easily digestible replies, and conflate that with "human". Because of course it would be crazy for a human to expend "that much effort" on something /s.

EDIT: having said that, many of the other articles on the blog do look like what would come from AI assistance. Stuff like pervasive emojis, overuse of bulleted lists, excessive use of very small sections with headers, art that certainly appears similar in style to AI generated assets that I've seen, etc. If anything, if AI was used in this article, it's way less intrusive than in the other articles on the blog.

yuvadam• 8 months ago

This blog post isn't human speech, it's typical AI slop. (heh, sorry.)

Way too verbose to get the point across, excessive usage of un/ordered bullets, em dashes, "what i reported / what coinbase got wrong", it all reeks of slop.

Once you notice these micro-patterns, you can't unsee them.

Would you like me to create a cheat sheet for you with these tell tale signs so you have it for future reference?

stefan_• 8 months ago

Sorry but I think you just don't know a lot about LLMs. Why did they start spamming code with emojis? It's not because that is what people actually do, something that is in the training data. It's because someone reinforcement learned the LLM to do it by asking clueless people if they prefer code with emojis.

And so at this point the excessive bullet points and similar filler trash is also just an expression of whatever stupid people think they prefer.

Maybe I'm being too harsh and it's not the raters are stupid in this constellation, rather it's the ones thinking you could improve the LLM by asking them to make a few very thin judgements.

glitchc• 8 months ago

Supporting evidence required.

gnabgib• 8 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45948625

BobAliceInATree• 8 months ago

I don't know if he wrote it via AI, but he repeats himself over and over again. It could have been 1/3 the length and still conveyed the same amount of information.

d1sxeyes• 8 months ago

'I don't know if he wrote it via AI, but he repeats himself'.

alwa• 8 months ago

I know I shouldn’t pile on with respect to the AI Slop Signature Style, but in the hopes of helping people rein in the AI-trash-filter excesses and avoid reactions like these…

The sentence-level stuff was somewhat improved compared to whatever “jaunty Linked-In Voice” prompt people have been using. You know, the one that calls for clipped repetitive phrases, needless rhetorical questions, dimestore mystery framing, faux-casual tone, and some out-of-proportion “moral of the story.” All of that’s better here.

But there’s a good ways left to go still. The endless bullet lists, the “red flags,” the weirdly toothless faux drama (“The Call That Changed Everything”, “Data Catastrophe: The 2025 Cyber Fallout”), and the Frankensteined purposes (“You can still protect yourself from falling victim to the scams that follow,” “The Timeline That Doesn't Make Sense,” etc.)…

The biggest thing that stands out to me here (besides the essay being five different-but-duplicative prompt/response sessions bolted together) are the assertions/conclusions that would mean something if real people drew them, but that don’t follow from the specifics. Consider:

“The Timeline That Doesn't Make Sense

Here's where the story gets interesting—and troubling:

[they made a report, heard back that it was being investigated, didn’t get individual responses to their follow-ups in the immediate days after, the result of the larger investigation was announced 4 months later]”

Disappointing, sure. And definitely frustrating. But like… “doesn’t make sense?” How not so? Is it really surprising or unreasonable that it takes a large organization time, for a major investigation into a foreign contractor, with law enforcement and regulatory implications, as well as 9-figure customer-facing damages? Doesn’t it make sense (even if it’s disappointing), when stuff that serious and complex happens, that they wait until they’re sure before they say something to an individual customer?

I’m not saying it’s good customer service (they could at least drop a reply with “the investigation is ongoing and we can’t comment til it’s done”). There’s lots of words we could use to capture the suckage besides “doesn’t make sense.” My issue is more that the AI presents it as “interesting—and troubling; doesn’t make sense” when those things don’t really follow directly from the bullet list of facts afterward.

Each big categorical that the AI introduced this way just… doesn’t quite match what it purports to describe. I’m not sure exactly how to pin it down, but it’s as if it’s making its judgments entirely without considering the broader context… which I guess is exactly what it’s doing.

gblargg• 8 months ago

The page background slowly fades in and out with a blue color. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me.

AlexErrant• 8 months ago

Here's a Reuters report from June 2, which includes a link to a May 14 SEC filing:

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase knew as far back as January about a customer data leak at an outsourcing company connected to a larger breach estimated to cost up to $400 million, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

On May 11, 2025, Coinbase, Inc., a subsidiary of Coinbase Global, Inc. (“Coinbase” or the “Company”), received an email communication from an unknown threat actor claiming to have obtained information about certain Coinbase customer accounts, as well as internal Coinbase documentation, including materials relating to customer-service and account-management systems.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679788/000167978825...

jclarkcom13• 8 months ago

Very interesting... January 7th is when I reported it to them so that lines up. I suspect I wasn't the very first person, the person I spoke with on the phone had the confidence I wouldn't expect on the first try.

j-bos• 8 months ago

an outsourcing company

From what I've seen, this is going to be a common subheading to a lot of these stories.

johnebgd• 8 months ago

Business process outsourcing firm most likely (BPO). They get contracts for every kind of company you’ve ever heard of, lie about their cybersecurity practices, and then rebrand if they get caught.

chaps7• 8 months ago

Once did some programming/networking work for a company that did the networking of a office sharing building that Coinbase was running out of. Early in my work there I noticed that the company had its admin passwords written on a whiteboard -- visible from the hallway because they had glass for walls. So I sent them an email to ask that they remove it (I billed them for it).

Their fix was to put a piece of paper over the passwords.

What a time.

Aurornis3• 8 months ago

So I sent them an email to ask that they remove it (I billed them for it)

Sending unsolicited bills for unrequested services is a great way to make sure nobody takes your email seriously

nightpool4• 8 months ago

GP is saying that they were already one of Coinbase's vendors (they did the networking/IT setup for Coinbase's office). Whether you'd tolerate that kind of behavior from a vendor is one thing, but for an existing vendor relationship I think adding a few billable hours for "I found this issue in your network and documented and reported it for you" to an existing contract is not particularly unreasonable.

bongodongobob• 8 months ago

They are lucky they just got a bill and not a terminated contract. Consulting companies I have worked for would have dropped them immediately because we don't want clients with that kind of risk. Massive red flag that signals management is non-existent, incompetent, or checked out. That is egregious negligence.

650REDHAIR2• 8 months ago

This doesn’t surprise me at all.

Bitcoin, and really fintech as a whole, are beyond reckless.

monero-xmr• 8 months ago

Ah yes, I remember all the times they hacked bitcoin

KetoManx6411• 8 months ago

Bitcoin is a crypto-currency/blockchain. Coinbase is a corporation that allows users to buy/trade crypto-currencies.

With Bitcoin you do not get government bailouts like what happened with the beyond reckless banks in 2008.

danielhlockard• 8 months ago

You say that but I work in fintech (granted, one of the larger more corporate ones, after an acquisition) and we are heavily regulated, and audited.

spacecadet• 8 months ago

Its sad they call it cryptocurrency when its just dumb ass finance but with play money that idiots ascribe real value to and the old saying holds true... the rich get richer and the poor are born without assholes. I'll die happy having never participated.

meindnoch• 8 months ago

In traditional fintech, you can at least sue your money back.

bhawks4• 8 months ago

That is a great ancedote.

Not saying it is untrue, but it is definitely true that Coinbase has never lost customer funds while operating in an environment with 0 safety nets and being one of the most lucrative targets.

This leak over customer data suggests that they should treat that with as much obsession as they do with their private keys.

arcticbull3• 8 months ago

That's not actually true, back in the day Coinbase used Bitfinex. They were using them when Bitfinex got all that BTC stolen. Technically everyone, including Coinbase, lost assets in that hack. They were large and scary enough at the time to force Bitfinex to keep them whole instead of applying the 36% haircut, but I'd argue that amounts to recovery rather than failure to lose in the first place. [1, 2]

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/10/28/tether-and-bitfinex

[2] https://x.com/nathanielpopper/status/933130228175552513

chaps7• 8 months ago

Your post reads like something a lawyer would write to convey something that while (maybe) technically true, misses the point by a hundred miles.

eckesicle• 8 months ago

I very much doubt the veracity of this claim. I worked at Coinbase for many years and this runs completely afoul of the culture there.

Even leaving your laptop unlocked for seconds in the office would have someone /pwn it in slack and get flagged by security.

If there’s one thing they took extremely seriously it was data security.

chaps7• 8 months ago

You're misreading my post with Coinbase-tinted glasses. My post is about the building that Coinbase operated out of. Not Coinbase itself.

BrenBarn• 8 months ago

[flagged]

anonym292• 8 months ago

Your employer doesn't utilize low-cost overseas labor to pad margins?

rs1862• 8 months ago

Not parent but mine doesn't let them handle client social security numbers.

sfblah• 8 months ago

I've read that blockchain can be used to eliminate the risk of crypto companies doing shady things. /s

tomhow• 8 months ago

shocked, shocked

Please omit internet tropes and avoid posting shallow dismissals on HN. Substantive critique is always fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tchalla• 8 months ago

Founder mode.

anonym292• 8 months ago

Has anyone demonstrated that agentic AI systems can be bribed with money, or is that vulnerability still strictly relegated to unrealiable, untrustworthy biological intelligence?

paulbjensen• 8 months ago

I got rung in the UK I think a month ago from someone claiming to be from Coinbase. I told them I only had about £5 of Bitcoin cash in my account (which was true), and they immediately lost interest and said a forthcoming email would handle the matter.

They also asked if I had cold storage. I told them I had a fridge (also true).

KetoManx6411• 8 months ago

Hahaha, i'm using this next time I get a spam call

naruhodo• 8 months ago

An elderly friend of mine has been receiving Coinbase security alerts. Needless to say, she has never used the site and has no crypto.

jrm4• 8 months ago

FWIW, this is why "not your keys, not your coins."

Coinbase is good for on-ramping, bad for storage. You know, the entire point of cryptocurrency.

wmf• 8 months ago

People doing self-custody also get hacked and phished all the time.

petesergeant• 8 months ago

https://imgflip.com/i/acbvxh

jclarkcom13• 8 months ago

True - but be very careful. Roughly 10–18% of all BTC are believed gone forever due to lost keys/wallets. That is more than all hacks and exchange blowups combined. If you take your wallet offline it can be hard not to lose your keys over a long period of time, including across death to your next of kin.

mtlynch2• 8 months ago

This is an extremely clickbaity headline.

The "recordings" are of a phisher attempting to get information from the author. It proves nothing about what Coinbase knew.

The author turned the information over to Coinbase, but that doesn't prove Coinbase knew about their breach. The customer could have leaked their account details in some other way.

jclarkcom13• 8 months ago

I sent the phone recording and emails to coinbase, and they acknowledged them saying "This report is super robust and gives us a lot to look into. We are investigating this scammer now."

mmooss2• 8 months ago

It seems like you did a great job collecting info and reporting it. Still, how do you know that the info was obtained via Coinbase? Certainly they are a likely vector but you are too, and maybe there are others.

Edit: Nevermind; I see you addressed that here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45948808

mtlynch2• 8 months ago

The recordings don't prove anything about what Coinbase knew.

I stand by my statement that the title is clickbait, as it's misleading on two fronts:

- It's the email, not the call recording that proves what Coinbase knew, but "recordings prove" sounds more sensational

- The email proves that Coinbase was aware of a sophisticated attack against a single user. You didn't have enough information to prove that there was a large scale leak of Coinbase customer data. There are sophisticated attacks against individual Coinbase users all the time due to the value of the accounts there.

rs1862• 8 months ago

You apparently did not read the article. What you are looking for is right there.

csomar2• 8 months ago

The article seems to be written by AI and goes into lots of details none of which is about how Coinbase knew about this.

what-the-grump• 8 months ago

We use Coinbase as an org, we were targeted in early Feb 2025. Caught by person handling the accounts who is paranoid enough to reach out to the org contact on the other side.

fragmede5• 8 months ago

My Coinbase account got caught up in this and I'm so glad I used something like coinbase_jridi46@example.com as my email address with them because emails to that address can be treated as hostile in the wake of the breach. if I'd just used coinbase@example.com as my email address with them, I'd be fucked.

immibis6• 8 months ago

Why couldn't you treat coinbase@example.com as hostile?

fragmede5• 8 months ago

because it's guessable. If I sign up with Coinbase@example.com, real Coinbase will send me legitimate emails to that address, as well as scammers, so I have to dig into the headers to make sure the email is or isn't forged.

happyopossum2• 8 months ago

Interesting timeline, but nothing here proves, or even strongly indicates, that Counbase “knew about the breach” from this one report.

Screenscraping malware is fairly common, and it’s not unreasonable for an analyst to look at a report like this and assume that the customer got popped instead of them.

Customers get popped all the time, and have a tendency to blame the proximate corporation…

jclarkcom13• 8 months ago

That's true, but in this case I got a response from the head of trust and safety after I sent the phone recording, email + email headers, saying "This report is super robust and gives us a lot to look into. We are investigating this scammer now."

bpt3• 8 months ago

So they looked into it and eventually determined the root cause and then took action.

I don't know why you think acknowledgement of your report is concrete evidence that coinbase knew about their breach months before it was disclosed.

anxman• 8 months ago

Not sure if the op is reading, but I also detected the same Coinbase hack around the same timeline. From what I can tell, literally everything was compromised because even their Discord channel's api keys were compromised and were finally reset around April or May. This means their central secrets manager was likely compromised too.

8organicbits4• 8 months ago

This doesn't seem like proof to me.

The author got a phishing call and reported it. Coinbase likely has a deluge of phishing complaints, as criminals know their customers are vulnerable and target their customers regularly. The caller knowing account details is likely not unique in those complaints; customers accidentally leak those all the time. Some of the details the attacker knew could have been sourced from other data breaches. At the time of complaint, the company probably interpreted the report as yet another customer handling their own data poorly.

Phishing is so pervasive that I wouldn't be surprised if the author was hit by a different attack.

jclarkcom13• 8 months ago

My first thought was someone they tied a blockchain transaction to my name and then traced it backwards. But they also knew my ETH and BTC balances, and date the account was opened. You might be able to figure out the open date by looking at the blockchain but I could never determine how they would know balances for two unrelated cryptos without some kind of coinbase compromise.

8organicbits4• 8 months ago

but I could never determine how they would know balances for two unrelated cryptos

There's tons of options. Malware, evil maid, shoulder surfing, email compromise, improper disposal of printouts, prior phishing attack, accidental disclosure.

xboxnolifes• 8 months ago

I don't know if ive gotten calls (I frequently dont answer if I dont have the contact saved), but ive gotten coinbase phasing emails for years. Its certainly not a new thing. The attacker might just be tracking the transactions on chain.

coolThingsFirst• 8 months ago

The entire web3 scene is a clusterfuck filled with scammers. Recently i got hacked by web3 interview which is a common vector nowadays.

They send github repo and as soon as you run it they send rejection after stealing tokens and installing keylogger. Pretty sophisticated and the frontend of the codebase looked polished as well.

BergAndCo• 8 months ago

Coinbase froze everyone's accounts (to prevent a selloff) while cashing in on insider knowledge that they were going to start supporting Bitcoin Cash. Then as soon as they sold off and the market dipped, they unfroze everyone's account. But instead of being in jail, they just keep getting away with it.

SilverElfin2• 8 months ago

This type of behavior is what the SEC was made to solve. But to be honest insider trading is behind MOST hedge funds and other firms with unusually gains. And politicians with big gains. It’s a huge problem that won’t get solved. Maybe taxing them is the only way.

smeej2• 8 months ago

You (and everyone else ostensibly affected) have had like 7 years to sue over this if you could prove it.

WatchDog• 8 months ago

So the emails had proper DKIM signatures.

Did the support agents have the ability to send arbitrary emails from commerce@coinbase.com? If not, how did the scammers send a properly signed email?

dwohnitmok• 8 months ago

Yeah what is going on here?

What does this mean?

While both amazonses.com and coinbase.com DKIM checks passed, this is exactly how phishing works—attackers can configure Amazon SES to send "from" coinbase.com

How does Amazon SES let you sign an email from a domain you don't control? Unless this means that somehow the scammer had access to DNS records for coinbase.com which indicates some really crazy compromise somewhere either of Coinbase or the DNS chain.

I'm very confused.

SilverElfin2• 8 months ago

A related issue: often when there’s a security issue, the wrong people are blamed. In reality it is almost always the CEO’s fault for setting budgets or goals that are unrealistic and force everyone else to cut corners. Even other executives are a victim of this and are ultimately powerless.

aantix• 8 months ago

Offshoring support for financial data should be illegal.

Even if they find the inside individuals, how could anyone ever present a legal case?

nalekberov• 8 months ago

In July, 2025 I asked Coinbase to delete my account permanently, for which i had a bit of back-and-forth with customer service representatives, in the end I got an email confirming the deletion, then I tried to log into my account, I was still successful - they lied about it.

Then I reached out to customer service several times - no answer. Then I contacted dedicated channel for privacy related questions with all proofs of mishandling - radio silence.

It’s sad to see these companies mishandle our very personal data and get away with this.

garlic-man• 8 months ago

That wouldn't surprise me — A few years ago I reported a vulnerability through their bug bounty program that allowed "mandatory" 2FA for crypto withdrawals to be bypassed.

They paid a pittance and permanently buried the report even though its release wouldn't have posed a risk anymore.

garbagewoman2• 8 months ago

You do realize that chatgpt has a very recognizable and irritating style, right?

rdos2• 8 months ago

Hello, I am interested in this topic. What would you say were the tale tale signs of AI generated text for you? Apart from:

- excessive em-dashes

- useless words, verbosity

I_am_tiberius• 8 months ago

I remember Brian Armstrong saying something like "... and other data" when he communicated the data that was collected and then stolen. That tells a lot about him.

LatteLazy• 8 months ago

I have a tradfi background but work in crypto with trading software.

The whole industry (except deribit) is a shit show of barely working apis that aren’t reliable or accurate in any way. It’s completely routine to not be able to get an order status for minutes at a time. Or to get fills after an order has been rejected. Or a week after a cancel confirmation message.

Coinbase is actually one of the worst offenders for this. Coinbase Prime, their supposed institutional grade offering especially so.

So it doesn’t surprise me at all that the same issues are happening more widely.

To be clear: deribit have always been efficient, accurate, reliable and generally excellent. If you must trade crypto, do it there so you’re Ops and Support people don’t have to suffer.

sourgrapes42• 8 months ago

Did they ever email customers that there was a data breach? I started getting scam messages about my Coinbase account in the beginning of the year and only realized they had a breach because I happened to see their post twitter. I dont remember getting notified about it though.

I have recordings proving Coinbase knew about breach months before disclosure

Related Stories