KeepKey, a Washington-based bitcoin hardware wallet provider, announced that it is offering 30 BTC as bounty for finding out the hacker who allegedly acquired the access to emails, phone numbers, customer information and browser information on December 25, 2016.
According to KeepKey blog post, the company CEO Darin Stanchfield reported that an attacker was able to activate a new phone under his PIN-protected Verizon account and used this access to conduct an account recovery on the email account. The hacker immediately began resetting accounts linked with that email. However, the company detected and was able to shut down all email for the entire domain and had set up a secured, limited email server that let them begin reversing the account resets that the attacker had performed.
“The attacker contacted us by phone seeking payment as we were beginning to reverse the damage. The attacker demanded 30 BTC, and in return, he promised to tell us how he got into my email, what information he received, destroy the data, return all accounts, and keep the breach secret,” the blog stated.
The company recovered every account except our @bitcoinkeepkey Twitter handle, where the attacker had switched the email linked to the account. The company filed two separate reports with the FBI Cyber Division, including all the information about the attack. KeepKey also assured that the customer funds stored on KeepKey devices remain safe.
Mentioning about the reward, Darin stated in the blog, “Although there was absolutely no way we would ever negotiate with or pay off a criminal to keep this breach secret, we do want to see his capture. We are offering 30 BTC, the amount he requested, as a bounty. Any tip that leads to an arrest qualifies for this reward. Information can be provided anonymously: just include a bitcoin address for payment of the reward.”
KeepKey recently added Ethereum support due to soaring community demand.
