Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino stated that he didn’t see any requests for money from hackers; therefore, if they were being truthful, they would have made a demand.
Paolo Adoino, the CTO at Bitfinex, believes that the hackers collective FSOCIETY’s claim that they hacked Bitfinex and leaked 22,500 customer’s passwords and emails is not true. Since the hackers haven’t demanded a ransom, he thinks its’s fake.
In a post shared on May 4, Ardoino explained:
“If they had any real information, they would have asked a ramson through our bug bounty, customer support ticket, emails, Twitter, etc. We couldn’t find any requests.”
He continued:
“We don’t store plaintext passwords, nor 2FA secrets in clear text.”
Only 5, according to Ardoino, matched Bitfinex users among 22,500 emil and password information that FSOCIETY claimed. He believes that this data was most likely obtained by the hackers from other cryptographic breaches.
He explained:
“Most users unfortunately use the same email and passwords across multiple sites.”
Paolo Ardoino also shared a message from security researchers. The analyst thinks that in order to advertise hacking for data retrieval, the hackers may be pretending to have breached Bitfinex.this suggests that the claim of hacking Bitfinex might be a publicity stunt rather than a genine hack.
“So by creating a buzz about successfully hacking well-known companies / a university, it is an advertisement of how good their tool is and why others should buy it so they can make millions of dollars by using it to exploit companies using this tool.”
Ardoino gave users the reassurance that they were still looking into the matter. No security breach has been discovered so far, and he confirmed that all “funds are safe.”.
Not just in this recent event, but also in the past, Bitfinex has faced security and data breach concerns.
Cointelegraph revealed that Bitfinex experienced a minor information security breach in November 2023. It involved the hacking of a customer service representative.
Phishing attempts targeting Bitfinex users increased as a result of the incident. Bitfinex stated that the outcome didn’t do much harm.
A security breach that occurred at Bitfinex back in 2016 resulted in the loss of 119,576 client’s Bitcoin (BTC), which was worth about $70 million at the time. Given the substantial increase in the value of Bitcoin in recent times, this loss would now be worth almost $7.6 billion.
