It is no news that there are several companies out there that are in the habit of meeting social media companies to pay for harvested private data, and while we still have that to think about, let us also not forget there are hackers on the prowl all over the internet, looking for ‘phishing’ ways to get people’s private data for different reasons. A lot of people are skeptical about the KYC/AML system being implemented, as there is some paranoia about what could happen if the KYC document’s database gets attacked, well, this recent leak may confirm their misgivings.
Digitex Leak
In a recent development, KYC documents that belong to Digitex users got leaked. These documents include scans of driving licenses, passports, and several other sensitive and private data that belong to over 8,000 Digitex users. The crypto exchange that is located in Seychelles said they are not able to say much about the incident, but are going to get legal counsel to take action. However, they did mention that the security breach was not external; rather it was from a disgruntled ex-employee who had something against the company.
A source that would prefer to remain anonymous said the private data and KYC documents of 8,000 Digitex users save not really been breached, citing that the leaker has only posted three IDs, and wants his demands met or he would leak the rest. However, the leaker on Telegram said he had the whole KYC details about every user who joined the Digitex Treasury platform from the very first day it began operations till date.
It may interest you to know that this breach in Digitex’s data security did not just start today, because things began to go awry for the exchange platform when the said ex-employee took over the platform’s Facebook account and began to post the email addresses of the platform’s users. On 10th February, 2020, Digitex said they were on top of the situation, as the email addresses were the only data that could be leaked, and nothing else. However, the leaker proved them wrong with the recent development.
February 2020 has witnessed different data breaches. For instance, On the 21st February, 2020, Coinhako, a crypto exchange located in Singapore suffered what it referred to as a “Sophisticated Attack”, and had to reimburse the affected customers. On the 27th February, 2020, Bitfinex and Okex suffered distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and even though it was not really bad for Okex, Bitfinex had to switch to maintenance mode in order to activate patches and countermeasures to protect users of the platform from more attacks.
One thing is certain, as long as there is the internet, and private data gets shared via the internet, there will always be some persons looking to get illegal access to people’s private data for evil reasons. It is important to be careful about sharing private data, because at the end of it all, it is better to be safe, than sorry, and exchange platforms need to improve on their security.