In a piece published by popular crypto news outlet Cointelegraph on the 14th of December 2022, "5,701,5649 lines of information about Gemini customers have been leaked by a data breach." Zhiyun, the reporter, stated in the report that Cointelegraph evaluated documents that have indicated the leak, including "Gemini customers' email addresses and partial phone numbers."
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On that very day, Gemini released a publication emphasizing the need to safeguard customers from hacking events, and it went ahead to announce that an external party (a third party) was the brain behind its data breach. "Some Gemini customers have recently been the target of phishing campaigns that we believe are the result of an incident at a third-party vendor," the trading platform’s blog post discloses. "This incident led to the collection of Gemini customer email addresses and partial phone numbers."
Gemini’s post adds:
No Gemini account details or systems were badly affected by the phishing event perpetuated by an external party. All funds that belong to customers are safe and intact; nothing has been toyed with or carted away. Historically, Gemini is not the first crypto firm to become a victim of a data leak, as Ledger, the hardware wallet manufacturer, encountered some problems with a customer data leak two years ago, in 2020. Just last year, Buyucoin, located in India, suffered from a similar event where it was alleged that over 325,000 users' sensitive data was leaked.
This year, in July, another company, Celsius, also mentioned that customer data was leaked prior to the company's decision to file for bankruptcy. It is quite interesting that many noteworthy companies have suffered from a similar situation. OpenSea also revealed that it was the victim of stolen data from an unidentified source.
However, the post made by Gemini detailed that the protection of customer money and other affiliated accounts is the main goal of the firm. Gemini also mentioned that it does not advise users to depend on "the secrecy of an email address as a replacement for solid authentication schemes." In addition, the firm highlighted step-by-step instructions on how to adjust an email linked with a particular Gemini account.
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