Bloomberg Reports: Binance and Kraken Fend Off Hacker Attacks Similar to Coinbase Incident

The exchanges Binance and Kraken have successfully defended themselves against attacks utilizing social engineering tactics that affected Coinbase, according to reports from Bloomberg citing sources.

On May 15, the prominent American cryptocurrency trading platform reported a data breach resulting from bribery of foreign customer support employees. Coinbase claimed that the leak affected no more than 1% of its customers. The attackers accessed users’ names, addresses, and email addresses, but not their passwords or private keys.

According to the publication, one of the individuals affected was Roelof Botha, managing partner at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.

Coinbase declined to pay the $20 million ransom demanded by the hackers and took steps to enhance its security measures. However, the platform assessed the costs for incident resolution and user compensation at between $180 million and $400 million.

To aid in tracking down the perpetrators, the company established a reward fund of $20 million, reported the incident to law enforcement, and provided authorities with information about employees leaking data.

Sources told Bloomberg that Binance and Kraken faced similar attempts but were able to thwart them thanks to their internal policies and technologies.

Binance’s AI-driven systems detected attempts to bribe customer support staff, the sources elaborated.

They indicated that security personnel from multiple exchanges had received intelligence in December 2024 regarding hackers targeting high-profile Coinbase clients, with at least one competitor sending the platform several alerts about these threats.

In March, users from the exchange reported phishing emails. The attackers impersonated Coinbase, attempting to persuade users to transfer their assets to new wallets using pre-generated seed phrases.

In May, on-chain investigator ZachXBT noted that over the course of a week, the attackers stole $45 million from users of the platform through social engineering techniques.