Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has paid a $250,000 reward to a hacker alias Tree of Alpha who discovered a vulnerability that could “blow up the market.”
According to an article on the company’s blog, Tree of Alpha reported the vulnerability to the company on the evening of February 11th. He wrotethat “he needs to urgently speak with the managers or developers of Coinbase, as the problem cannot wait.” The exchange specialists contacted the hacker and began work on fixing the vulnerability.
An error was discovered in a new trading function in the beta version of the site. The hacker, using two accounts on the exchange, could place orders to sell cryptocurrencies using balances in other coins. That is, for example, he could “sell” 100 BTC, although he would have only 100 SHIB in his account.
“The user sent a market order in the BTC/USD pair to sell 100 BTC, but by manually adjusting the request in the platform API, he used an account with a balance in SHIB as a source of funds. Accordingly, an order to sell 100 bitcoins would appear in the order book,” write the representatives of the exchange.
Coinbase paid Tree of Alpha a $250,000 reward for discovering the vulnerability. The hacker noted that he discovered the vulnerability by accident – he managed to sell 0.0243 BTC using the same amount of ETH in his wallet. He found out that the order was indeed filled by the platform engine and contacted the exchange.
Recall that after the vulnerability was reported, Coinbase disabled trading on the Advanced Trading platform.
Source: Bits
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