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Cryptocurrency exchanges have gotten a lot of criticism lately. They’re easy to hide from the IRS, are high-valid targets for hackers and easily affect tech issues too. It appears that Coinbase avoided a nasty situation thanks to a bug report by financial security firm VI Company.
The company reported a nasty bug in Coinbase’s cryptocurrency system that has been found and fixed (via Gizmodo). Researchers found that users could easily add unlimited either to their Coinbase account with some simply and easy-to-follow steps.
According to a report on HackerOne website, VI Company found the flaw when planning to give its employees some ether as a Christmas present last December. Taking a set of digital wallets, they could have used as a smart contract and tricked into thinking that a transfer of the ether cryptocurrency had occurred when it actually did not. Essentially, this bug would have allowed any Coinbase customer to fictionally move as much either as they wanted into their account. Whether customers would have been able to cash the ether is another story, but Coinbase has already fixed the bug, and awarded VI Company a $10,000 bug bounty.
