Paolo Ardoino Dismisses Rumors That Bitfinex Suffered Database Breach Last Month

Bitfinex chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino is rejecting rumors that the crypto exchange was a victim of a database exploit last month.

Ardoino, who also serves as Tether’s chief executive, says on the social media platform X that the database breach appears fake and that users’ funds are safe.

According to Ardoino, the details of the supposed hack don’t line up and a deep analysis of the crypto exchange’s systems revealed no breach. He goes on to note that security researchers may have jumped the gun by hyping the alleged exploit.

“Everyone [is] panicking for a potential database breach on Bitfinex. TLDR (too long, did not read): seems fake.

The alleged hackers have posted two mega links with sample data containing 22,500 records of email and passwords.

• • We don’t store plaintext passwords, nor 2FA (two-factor authentication) secrets in clear text.
  • Only 5,000 of 22,500 emails are matching with Bitfinex users. If that was part of our database, we would expect 100% matching.
  • The alleged hackers didn’t contact us. Their post was published on the 25th of April, giving seven days to contact them. Yet we discovered this claim only on [May 3rd]. If they had any real information, they would have asked a ransom through our bug bounty, customer support ticket, emails, Twitter, etc. We couldn’t find any request…

From what we could gather, the hackers collected a database of emails/passwords likely from different crypto breaches. Most users unfortunately use the same email/passwords across multiple sites.”

Ardoino praises an unnamed cybersecurity expert who he says closely examined the details of the event instead of 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 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.

So it seems you are the clickbait to give this tool credence so the sellers of this tool can scam other scammers.”

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