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Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase recently announced that it had suffered a massive data breach in January this year, affecting over 69,000 customers—the crypto giant's biggest security failure till date.
The data breach, which could cost the company a whopping $400 million, reportedly took place after hackers bribed call centre agents in India to leak sensitive data about users.
According to a report by Fortune, Coinbase's customer care was handled by a business process outsourcing (BPO) firm named TaskUs, which offered the crypto giant low rates by employing cheap labour overseas.
Despite being US-based, TaskUs has a large presence in India, and the firm's agents in Indore primarily handled support for Coinbase, according to filings dating back to 2017.
However, in January this year, TaskUs laid off 226 of its Indore employees, weeks after the data breach was first detected, and it is understood that the firm traced to breach to some of these individuals.
“As we’ve already disclosed, we recently discovered that a threat actor had solicited overseas agents to capture customer account information dating back to December of 2024. We notified affected users and regulators, cut ties with the TaskUs personnel involved and other overseas agents, and tightened controls,” Coinbase was quoted as saying in a statement.
So, if the breach resulted out of mere bribery, could it have been avoided? Perhaps, according to Sergio Garcia, the founder of a crypto investigations company named Tracelon.
Speaking to Fortune, Garcia said that economic conditions drove TaskUs employees in Indore to accept bribes from hackers, something that can be attributed to low salaries paid to customer service agents by TaskUs.
According to Fortune, TaskUs customer service agents are paid roughly between Rs 40,000 to Rs 70,000 monthly ($500-700). While the salary offered by TaskUs is indeed higher than India's GDP per capita, the relatively low level of remuneration paves way for economic dissatisfaction and suspectibility to bribes, especially given the sensitive nature of information handled by said agents.
"Obviously that’s the weakest point in the chain, because there is an economic reason for them to accept the bribe," Garcia told Fortune.
While TaskUs salaries alone cannot be held responsible for criminal behaviour on account of agents, there could be an argument that higher remuneration could have prevented a breach like this.