More than 3 million email addresses from CoinMarketCap users leaked

The leading cryptocurrency price tracking platform CoinMarketCap (CMC) recently leaked the email addresses of more than 3 million users.

According to a new report from a website that tracks multiple cybersecurity threats, including hackers and compromised online accounts, approximately 3,117,548 email addresses of CMC users were leaked on October 12.

However, the leak remained unknown until the email addresses were discovered on several hacking forums where they were exchanged.

Coinmarketcap Confirms Data Leak

The report further revealed that the passwords for these leaked email addresses were not compromised during the hack.

Speaking on this, a representative from CMC said:

“CoinMarketCap has realized that lots of data has appeared online claiming to be a list of user accounts. While the data lists we saw are just email addresses (no passwords), we found a correlation with our subscriber base.

Knowing that no password has been compromised by the leak brings some relief to affected users. Additionally, the lack of passwords could indicate that the attack on CoinMarketCap probably would not have been for a major theft.

However, the data breach compromised user privacy and could lead to several targeted attacks against customers, including phishing.

Still a mystery

The representative for CoinMarketCap further revealed that the data breach did not originate from any of the site’s servers and that they had yet to identify the exact cause of the hack.

“We have not found any evidence of a data leak from our own servers – we are actively investigating this issue and will update our subscribers as soon as we have new information.”

Not the first

Meanwhile, data leaks are not a new phenomenon in the cryptocurrency industry. Over the past few years, several crypto companies including BitMEX, Ledger and many others have experienced similar user data leaks, putting millions of customers at risk.

In late 2020, hardware wallet provider Ledger discovered that the personal data of several of its users, including email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, and more, had been leaked on various public forums.