27 CommentsThis morning Coin Fire is learning of a major and massive security breach that happened on GAW Miner’s Paybase product.
The breach is just another stumble in a long list of issues this past week with GAW Miners after Amazon spokespeople told Coin Fire they were not working with the company to implement Paycoin shopping.
Leaked InformationLate last night Paybase was rolled out with much fanfare from Josh Garza and the supporters of the new alt coin PayCoin. A few short hours after rolling out the site a massive security breach was found by users of Bitcoin Talk that would allow users not logged in to visit a URL and essentially be logged in as another valid and registered user of the site.
Users accessing the site via this URL were able to obtain account information about users of Paybase including the current balance, email address and other profile information. While the security breach does not seem to have let those visiting the URL the ability to withdraw funds it did give the attackers the ability to secure large troves of data about Paybase users.
Leaked InformationCoin Fire was provided information detailing the breach and was able to confirm independently that the user information being provided was in fact real. After having spoken with several account holders from the list about the accounts they own on Paybase Coin Fire was able to confirm that information was being leaked.
Further Leaked InformationSeveral users took to the Hashtalk forums to report the security breach but all posts about it were immediately deleted and the problem persisted for over eight hours before the site was taken offline. The company claimed publicly the downtime was due to issues with CloudFlare but upon the site coming back online the security flaw had seemed to be closed.
Having taken more than eight hours to respond to the security issue could result in a massive security issue for those who have trusted Paybase. While account balances seem to be secure hackers have been able to get exact account balances, email addresses and other relevant information that could theoretically be used for blackmail or extortion purposes.
The Paybase homepage now boasts,
The funds you deposit into your wallet are protected by the same protection used by the CIA and all major banks.
It would seem that the security hole has now been closed but many doubts about the service’s security now stay after the long period it remained opened.
I reported nearly the same security flaw in ZenCloud back in September. GAW fixed it and Josh Garza personally thanked me (without so much as offering a free Hashlet) — now to see this reoccur is just sad. This does not bode well for GAW’s lesson learning abilities.
I read the CCN article with a quick interview with Joe Mordica. How can this guy be a CTO? I see finger pointing because Paybase presented pages as static content and did not set any no-cache headers. This is app security and web dev 101. Instead of taking responsibility for their lack testing and shitty development they pointed the finger at CloudFlare. This would have happened on any CDN. I would like to see real proof of a glitch instead of some empty claims.
Emails stored on some third party servers can never be secure. To send secure email, first thing is to avoid getting it stored on external server. User Binfer will send messages directly. Check it out: http://www.binfer.com.
Kassado who idles in #bittrex on irc is payed by bittrex to hack “the competition”
It’s obvious no compliance standards or penetration testing took place in development of the web application. GAW has always focused too much on marketing and not enough substance. Josh Garza is a little like Harry Gordon Selfridge in the over-hype area of GAW. I’m not surprised to see this on launch day of their exchange. While I’m sure this will be solved and move on, the Mt. Gox like risks are all too familiar here with GAW.
More security misconfigurations:
http://pastebin.com/qZXrYbFR
Nmap shows them running ubuntu too.