Paolo Ardoino, head of technology at Bitfinex, dismisses rumors that the crypto exchange fell victim to a database exploit last month.
Ardoino, who is also CEO of Tether, say on social media platform X that the database leak appears fake and that users’ money is safe.
According to Ardoino, the details of the alleged hack are inaccurate and an in-depth analysis of the crypto exchange’s systems revealed no breach. He further notes that security researchers may have gone too far in hyping the alleged exploit.
“Everyone [is] panicked over a possible Bitfinex database breach. TLDR (too long, didn’t read): Seems fake.
The alleged hackers posted two megalinks with sample data containing 22,500 records of email and passwords.
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- We do not store plaintext passwords or 2FA (two-factor authentication) secrets in plaintext.
- Only 5,000 of the 22,500 emails correspond to Bitfinex users. If that were part of our database, we would expect 100% matching.
- The alleged hackers have not contacted us. Their post was published on April 25, giving them seven days to get back to them. Yet we only discovered this claim [May 3rd]. If they had any real information, they would have asked for ransom via our bug bounty, customer support ticket, emails, Twitter, etc. We couldn’t find a single request…
From what we could gather, the hackers collected a database of emails/passwords that likely came from various crypto breaches. Unfortunately, most users use the same email/passwords on multiple sites.”
Ardoino praise an unnamed cybersecurity expert who he says scrutinized the details of the event rather than panicking. According to the expert, the alleged data breach was essentially an advertisement for a tool that the hackers sell for a few hundred dollars.
“By creating a buzz about successfully hacking into well-known companies/a university, it is an advertisement for how good their tool is and others should buy it so they can make millions of dollars using it to exploit companies that use this use tool.
So it seems that you are the clickbait that makes this tool credible so that the sellers of this tool can scam other scammers.”
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