Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex experienced a minor security incident earlier this week through a phishing attack on one of its customer support representatives. 

Although the issue has now been resolved, such attacks only underline the constant attacks of bad actors on major key crypto infrastructures such as trading exchanges.

In a blog post on November 4, Bitfinex revealed that hackers perpetrated a phishing attack on a customer support agent; however, this venture yielded no gains for the bad venture.

According to the exchange, the targeted agent lacked senior permission, having only access to supporting tools and helpdesk tickets. 

Thus, the hackers obtained no valuable data in their attack, as they could only access a minor portion of Bitfinex customer support boards, which contained “partial, incomplete and stale information.” 

Bitfinex states that none of its operational systems was affected, nor were any of its server, wallet, or database infrastructure compromised. In addition, all customer assets remained safe and intact and were at no time accessible to the hackers.

However, there were some accounts affected by this attack, Bitfinex claims these accounts were empty or non-functional. Albeit, the exchange has stated it will contact the owners of these affected accounts.

At the time of writing, Bitfinex says it has contacted law enforcement, and it will be utilizing its close relationship with these agencies to ensure the hackers are caught and brought to book.

Founded in 2012, Bitfinex ranks as one of the oldest exchanges, boasting 3 million active users. Based in Hong Kong, the trading platform serves customers from 52 countries worldwide. 

As earlier stated, crypto exchanges are unsurprisingly common targets for hackers, considering the large amount of assets these trading platforms hold at every point in time. 

According to a report by Dunmanu, the operator of Upbit, the South Korean exchange recorded about 160,000 hacking attempts on its infrastructure in H1 2023. This is double the number of attacks the exchange experienced in the first half of 2022. 

While Upbit and Bitfinex may have scaled through these respective attacks, ”unhurt”,  other exchanges have suffered significant losses at the hands of these bad actors.

In April, the Bitrue exchange, with a daily trading volume of $1 billion, fell victim to an exploit, losing about $23 million worth of digital assets. 

Six months later, Hong Kong-based CoinEx experienced the largest heist on a centralized crypto exchange in 2023, as hackers drained about  $55.5 million worth of cryptocurrency from the platform’s hot wallets. These attacks only put emphasis on the continuous need for improvement of the security systems in the crypto space.

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