With this GMO incident, what the crypto world should be watching isn’t “crypto gets blamed again,” but how much the attackers actually demanded. Right now, three figures are being thrown around on X.
An X news roundup says $50 million in cryptocurrency; several Japanese posts on X say $1 million (about 160 million yen), with a deadline of noon on the 27th; and YouTube headlines say 7.9 billion yen, with the same headline copied verbatim by a bunch of accounts. The figures differ by a factor of 50, and nobody has posted the original source.
Here’s what can be confirmed: Onamae.com Desktop Cloud, a cloud server many people use to run automated FX trading, was compromised. The incident affected 26,739 machines, credentials were stolen, and more than 70 brokerage accounts were used to place unauthorized trades. One person lost 2.4 million yen in 84 seconds. GMO shut down the servers on October 21, refused to pay, reported the incident to police, and will compensate individuals confirmed to have suffered losses. On Monday evening, Japan’s prime minister held an emergency meeting with the finance and defense ministers; a response is due next week. The CEO himself admitted that earlier security warnings hadn’t been taken seriously.
I support refusing to pay; if they pay, the attackers will just come back for more. But failing to fix things after being warned, then letting it escalate to the point where the prime minister has to step in—that’s what’s truly outrageous. As for who’s behind it, only clickbait headlines are making claims so far; there’s been no official attribution, so don’t spread them.
If you’re running bots on a third-party cloud with your API keys sitting there, think about those 84 seconds.
#GMO #Cybersecurity
An X news roundup says $50 million in cryptocurrency; several Japanese posts on X say $1 million (about 160 million yen), with a deadline of noon on the 27th; and YouTube headlines say 7.9 billion yen, with the same headline copied verbatim by a bunch of accounts. The figures differ by a factor of 50, and nobody has posted the original source.
Here’s what can be confirmed: Onamae.com Desktop Cloud, a cloud server many people use to run automated FX trading, was compromised. The incident affected 26,739 machines, credentials were stolen, and more than 70 brokerage accounts were used to place unauthorized trades. One person lost 2.4 million yen in 84 seconds. GMO shut down the servers on October 21, refused to pay, reported the incident to police, and will compensate individuals confirmed to have suffered losses. On Monday evening, Japan’s prime minister held an emergency meeting with the finance and defense ministers; a response is due next week. The CEO himself admitted that earlier security warnings hadn’t been taken seriously.
I support refusing to pay; if they pay, the attackers will just come back for more. But failing to fix things after being warned, then letting it escalate to the point where the prime minister has to step in—that’s what’s truly outrageous. As for who’s behind it, only clickbait headlines are making claims so far; there’s been no official attribution, so don’t spread them.
If you’re running bots on a third-party cloud with your API keys sitting there, think about those 84 seconds.
#GMO #Cybersecurity