In each case, the same blindsiding realization arrives, bringing the inherent paradox of blockchain into focus. Since Christmas, there have been months when Coinbase users have been robbed as often as 30 times-a rate of one robbery every single day. On July 7, thieves emptied $18,000 from the Coinbase wallet of blockchain adviser Mike Costache, during the four hours he slept one night while traveling overseas. The day after Everett's robbery, Los Angeles entrepreneur Adam Dachis's account was wiped out of what was then $10,000. Since then, Fortune has spoken with more than a dozen victims, including tech CEOs and well-known blockchain proponents, whose Coinbase accounts have been targeted and hacked in almost exactly the same fashion still more have been attacked on other exchanges. Wilson managed to lock it down before anything was stolen, but in a rare public chastising of a company in his own portfolio, he wrote in a blog post: "I am still a bit shaken up from the experience and a fair bit more paranoid from it." Even Wilson himself was in for a rude awakening: While vacationing in Europe in early June, the VC woke up to the same telltale emails that Everett saw, signaling that an intruder was trying to get inside his Coinbase account. "They're like JPMorgan or for blockchain."īut Coinbase's individual customers do get burglarized-with surprising and unsettling frequency. all these things that, frankly, banks are good at," Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist and one of Coinbase's earliest and largest backers, said at a conference in March. The five-year-old Coinbase just raised $100 million in new funding, valuing the company at $1.6 billion-making it the blockchain industry's first "unicorn." "If you look at what they are world-class at, it's security, trust, safety. Last summer, thieves grabbed $72 million from Hong Kong cryptoexchange Bitfinex in one fell swoop.īut hackers have never breached Coinbase's own virtual fortress, and that impenetrability has earned it a reputation as the safest place to buy Bitcoin, helping it attract more than 9 million customers who store at least $3 billion in crypto-currency there, and who have traded $25 billion to date on its retail brokerage as well as its institutional exchange, GDAX. Gox, an exchange that collapsed in 2014 after hackers pillaged nearly $500 million in Bitcoin. Almost any early investor you talk to lost money in Mt. San Francisco's Coinbase, the world's largest exchange for trading cryptocurrency, is one of very few such companies whose own coffers have never been hacked, a distinction that carries extra weight in the realm of blockchain, where several costly breaches have made global headlines. Then again, the biggest surprise for Everett-and, it would turn out, for many other Bitcoin enthusiasts-was that the theft happened on Coinbase at all.
Gmail hacker bitcoin code#
A raft of email notifications confirmed that someone had taken control of his main Gmail account, then broken into his Coinbase "wallet." They'd gotten in with the help of his switched-over phone number: Everett's account required him to log in with a two-factor authentication code sent by text message, as a second safeguard-and now the text had gone straight to the thief. Less than five minutes later, Everett's cell service abruptly shut off, and as he rushed to his computer, he saw himself being robbed in real time. But even as he pleaded with the agent to block the switch, it was too late. It was a suspicious move that Everett had most certainly not requested. It was T-Mobile, ringing him to confirm that it was switching his phone number to a different device. on Wednesday, May 17, Everett got the call. But then, while he was out walking the dog after 10 p.m. The decision made Everett, the CEO of artificial intelligence startup Prome, almost instantly richer, as the blockchain-based currencies' value rocketed up exponentially over the next several weeks. In March, he sold all his stocks, including and, and used a chunk of the proceeds to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum on a site called Coinbase. But he definitely didn't expect it to be over so soon. Sean Everett wasn't sure how his bullish bet on cryptocurrency would turn out.
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