Reports indicate that CoinMarketCap (CMC), a cryptocurrency price-tracking portal, has been the latest victim of a hack that exposed over 3-million (3,117,548) email addresses of its users. The news surfaced after cyber criminals circulated the hacked email addresses on several hacking forums on the dark web.
The data had been published on a popular data breach forum back in August and it has now surfaced on the same forum again.
More than 27 million users from the US, Japan, and India among other countries visit the website to track the prices of various cryptocurrencies. Of late, there have been several reports of such cyber-attacks that target the crypto-community.
CoinMarketCap confirmed the correlation of the leaked email addresses with its user base, while assuring that the cyber-attackers did not get their hands on the account passwords or any other information. The team is yet to identify the actual cause of the hack.
As per investigation reports following a comprehensive security check, the CMC team has concluded that the leak was not from its own servers. They believe it could be mostly sourced from other platforms where subscribers may have reused passwords across several websites. It also cautioned users to use unique and separate passwords across various sites.
Irrespective of where the list was leaked from, having a long, precise list of consumers with interest in cryptocurrencies is useful for hackers for their phishing attempts. Considering that this list seems to have been in circulation for almost two months, phishing attempts are likely to have been occurring already.
