FTX is set to offer roughly $6 million USD to victims of a massive phishing attack which granted access to hackers, it was reported this week.
Sam Bankman-Fried, company founder and chief executive, posted a Twitter thread on 23 October that, although his company did not normally compensate victims of phishing scams, it would do so in the unprecedented attack as a “one-time thing” and not do so “going forward.”
The news comes after hackers gained access to conduct unauthorised trades of FTX users on the cryptocurrency exchange platform. The offenders bypassed the application programming interface (API) keys used to secure user accounts.13) But in this particular case, we will compensate the affected users.
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) October 23, 2022
THIS IS A ONE-TIME THING AND WE WILL NOT DO THIS GOING FORWARD.
THIS IS NOT A PRECEDENT.
We will not making a habit of compensating for uses getting phished by fake versions of other companies!
3Commas alerted the FTX community on 21 October that cybercriminals had compromised their accounts and conducted unauthorised activities, leading to suspending suspicious accounts.
In a blog post, it had stated the incident had taken place on 20 October, where a phishing attack bypassed its system. It did not report breaches of 3Commas’ account security or API encryptions
In a statement, Yuri Sorokin, Co-founder & CEO 3Commas.io said,
3Commas, in cooperation with our partner exchanges, is conducting an investigation of this incident to ensure our user community remains protected and feels safe to trade. We are working directly with the three individuals who claim to have been affected so that we can ascertain more details regarding how they stored their API keys and other sensitive data.
Hacktober Hits the Crypto World
The news comes after the Chainalysis crypto community stated on 13 October that the month had been one of the largest-ever periods for cybercrime, two weeks before the month’s end. Hackers had exploited over $3 billion USD in ‘hacktober’ across 125 incidences at the time of the report, it said.
Cryptocurrency platform giant Binance also reportedly lost $500 million in cryptocurrencies after an incident in early October, severely compromising the world’s largest platform.1/ After four hacks yesterday, October is now the biggest month in the biggest year ever for hacking activity, with more than half the month still to go. So far this month, $718 million has been stolen from #DeFi protocols across 11 different hacks. pic.twitter.com/emz36f6gpK
— Chainalysis (@chainalysis) October 12, 2022
The security breach forced the company to suspend transactions after finding exchanges between two blockchains exploited, resulting in over $570 million in losses and nearly $100 million unrecovered.
