69,461 People Impacted by Coinbase Data Breach, Exposing Addresses, Account Balances, Government IDs and Partial Social Security Numbers

Coinbase’s legal team says the exchange’s recently disclosed data breach impacted 69,461 people.

A filing with the Maine Attorney General’s Office outlines the massive scope of the breach, which happened in late December but was not discovered by Coinbase until earlier this month.

The exchange says criminals bribed a small group of overseas customer support agents to copy the data of less than 1% of the firm’s monthly transacting users.

Coinbase notes that hacked information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, masked social security numbers (the last 4 digits only), masked bank-account numbers, some bank account identifiers, government-ID images, account data and limited corporate data. The exchange says impacted customers were notified by email on May 15th.

Coinbase learned about the hack after receiving an email earlier this month demanding a $20 million Bitcoin (BTC) payoff in exchange for not releasing the illegally obtained info. The company refused to give in to the hackers’ demand and estimates it will pay $180 million to $400 million in remediation costs and voluntary customer reimbursements.

In a video posted to the social media platform X, Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong promised the exchange would pay back impacted customers, increase cyberattack defenses and relocate certain overseas customer support operations.

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