Security threat fears as Coinbase users receive suspicious email

It might have been funny if it were an April fools joke – 125,000 customers receive deceitful email from Coinbase platform by mistake.

Coinbase users feared the worst after receiving a fraud-like email alerting them that their two-factor authentication settings were changed.

Approximately 125,000 customers of the cryptocurrency exchange platform were caught up in the confusion.

“Yesterday from 1:45pm PST to 3:07pm PST, Coinbase sent erroneous notifications [telling users] that their 2FA settings had changed,” Coinbase tweeted.

“Our teams immediately recognised the problem and worked as quickly as possible to ensure these erroneous notifications were stopped and the underlying issue fixed.”

But despite the quick response, users continued to flock to social media with many under the impression that their accounts had been hacked.

“My two-factor settings have been changed? I didn’t do such a thing?” One user tweeted.

“Please look into this [Coinbase]…Please don’t let me get hacked.”

A focus on strengthening the relationship

The company understands that it needs to work on rebuilding trust between them and their clients following the incident.

However, they do blame their notification software for the issue.

“We’re laser focused on building trust and security into the crypto community so that the open finacial system we all want is a reality,” Coinbase said.

“We recognise that issues like this can hurt that trust and we will continue to work to gain back the trust of every one of our customers who was impacted by those notifications.”

Two-factor authentication is a common security method used to protect personal accounts.

Users are required to input information such as a text message code or password that helps verify that they’re the user.

Written by Rebecca Borg