Coinbase hackers achieved on-demand access to information, Bloomberg reports

Hackers bribed enough Coinbase (COIN) customer service representatives to achieve effectively on-demand access to Coinbase customer information since January, Bloomberg’s Margi Murphy and Emily Nicolle report. Coinbase Chief Security Officer Philip Martin disputed the assertion of near constant access, saying in an interview with Bloomberg that the company pulled the agents’ access as soon as it was discovered that they were improperly sharing information, and the hackers “did not have persistent access over the course of the entire period.” “What these attackers were doing was finding Coinbase employees and contractors based in India who were associated with our business process outsourcing or support operations, that kind of thing, and bribing them in order to obtain customer data,” Martin said. The hackers had access to this data as recently as Wednesday, a person familiar with the matter says, though Martin said “we have no reason to believe that is true at all” but could not “prove a negative.”