Altcoin News: An Attacker Demanded 300 BTC from Binance

August 7, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

The Binance cryptocurrency exchange gave an official response to information appeared on this Wednesday about the alleged leak of the database with information about its users.

According to the publication, the “unknown person” demanded to pay him 300 BTC for refusing to distribute 10,000 photographs “that bear similarity to Binance KYC data”. The company refused to cooperate with the attacker, after which he began to upload data to the public.

“ At the present time, no evidence has been supplied that indicates any KYC images have been obtained from Binance, as these images do not contain the digital watermark imprinted by our system,” the exchange writes. “ With that said, our security team is hard at work pursuing all possible leads in an attempt to identify the source of these images.”

An initial investigation revealed that the released photos date back to February 2018, when Binance contacted a third-party service provider to verify customers to handle the high volume of requests at that time. The exchange continues to study this issue.

The company believes that the photos distributed are related to events that were previously covered in the media. In response to a request for a data source, the attacker demanded Binance to pay 300 BTC. Binance has contacted the responsible law enforcement authorities and offers a reward of up to 25 BTC for reliable information about the unknown person.

Binance CEO Changpen Zhao in his Twitter also urged not to help attackers and not to spread a link to their group on Telegram. “ Stay on the positive side. Report the group, then leave,” writes Zhao.

Author: Marko Vidrih