For some time, the financial industry has been hearing rumors that the Estonia-based 3Commas suffered an API leak, which its officials denied for some time. However, the company’s CEO recently admitted that it did happen. Following this, a new rumor emerged that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation itself started investigating the breach. However, there were no official confirmations of the FBI’s involvement as of yet.
3Commas’ CEO admitted to the breach
According to rumors, the investigation started after Yuriy Sorokin, the CEO of 3Commas, admitted that the company did, in fact, suffer a security breach. He left an official statement on Twitter, noting that the company saw the hacker’s message and could confirm that the data in the files was true.
He added that the company reacted immediately after realizing the breach, and it contacted Binance, Kucoin, and other supported exchanges. It notified them of the situation and had them revoke the affected keys.
He also said that the company did everything in its power to investigate the possibility of it being an inside job, noting that this is always a possible scenario. However, it found no evidence that anyone from the company was involved in any way. Only a very small number of technical employees had access to the infrastructure, and their access was removed following November 19th, according to Sorokin.
He concluded the statement by saying that the company had implemented new security measures, and that it doesn’t intend to stop there. It is also in the process of launching a full investigation involving law enforcement. This last sentence could be what started the rumor of the FBI’s involvement.
The initial security alert came from FTX
The fact that the company’s CEO confirmed that the firm is upgrading security was received well by the community, as many had concerns about the security measures since late October. Back then, FTX issued a security alert regarding an unauthorized trade that involved a customer account.
Since then, FTX and 3Commas came to a joint conclusion that the hackers created a 3Commas account in order to conduct malicious trades. At the time, the firm said that the API keys did not come from 3Commas, but from an outside source. Now, however, the company admitted the API leak, stating that phishing was at least partially involved and that it has hard evidence of this.
Meanwhile, there were multiple reports of people losing funds due to the API leak, and earlier in December, Binance even canceled an account of a user who complained about it. However, the exchange decided not to reimburse the user, stating that it could not confirm that the user actually experienced losses.