Philip Martin Profile
Philip Martin

@SecurityGuyPhil

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CSO @ Coinbase. Army Veteran. Maker of delicious smoked meats and baked goods.

San Francisco, CA
Joined October 2014
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
9 months
hey @GaryGensler and @SECGov , serious offer: as a crypto exchange we've had a lot of experience with security protocols around social media, and as a veteran and patriot I love to help my country. If you'd like any suggestions feel free to reach out.
@SECGov
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
9 months
The @SECGov X account was compromised, and an unauthorized post was posted. The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
1/ A little more context on the Firefox 0-day reports. On Monday, Coinbase detected & blocked an attempt by an attacker to leverage the reported 0-day, along with a separate 0-day firefox sandbox escape, to target Coinbase employees.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
1/ I've seen a bunch of incorrect claims that Coinbase was involved in the recent DOJ seizure of bitcoin associated with the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack. We weren’t. a thread:
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
@TalBeerySec @ZenGo @CoinbaseWallet Hey @TalBeerySec , I lead security at Coinbase. We appreciate security researchers from around the world working with us to keep Coinbase products and customers safe. That message doesn't reflect how we want to engage with the security research community. 1/
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
7/ So how did they get the private key? Maybe some whiz-bang magic, but my guess would be it was some good ol' fashioned police work to locate the target servers, and an MLAT request and/or some political pressure to get access.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
1/ As promised, I’m now able to share an update on this investigation. As I noted previously, this kind of investigation is not quick, but is critical to maintaining a level playing field.
@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
@cobie Thanks, @cobie . My team has been investigating since yesterday. Investigations like this are not quick or simple but they are critical to determining the context surrounding those on-chain movements. Transparency is also key, so I will share any findings as soon as we are able.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
4 years
@nathanielpopper The security and availability of Coinbase’s cryptocurrency storage systems is not dependent on any one or small group of individuals in the company - it’s managed by several teams with redundancy built in in terms of both people and systems. 1/6
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
5/ Hashes (sha1): b639bca429778d24bda4f4a40c1bbc64de46fa79 23017a55b3d25a2597b7148214fd8fb2372591a5 C2 IPs: 89.34.111.113:443 185.49.69.210:80
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
1/ I don't have inside knowledge of what is happening inside @binance . That said, their on-chain movement of funds for audit purposes isn’t out of the norm and @coinbase did something similar many years ago when we first started 3rd party auditor review of custodial assets. 🧵
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
2/ We walked back the entire attack, recovered and reported the 0-day to firefox, pulled apart the malware and infra used in the attack and are working with various orgs to continue burning down attacker infrastructure and digging into the attacker involved.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
@TalBeerySec @ZenGo @CoinbaseWallet We'll fix the process that lead to that message going out the door. Good luck on your presentation!
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
5/ Coinbase uses a pooled hot wallet, so handing over a specific private key wouldn't make a ton of sense, and we've (for obvious security reasons) not built a private key export API endpoint into our signing systems.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
3/ I’ve seen some folks point to @Bitquery_io graphs which say “Coinbase” and it appears to be a reference to the concept rather than the company. 2 tx are missing a receiver address field in the underlying GraphQL data making their UI think it’s a coinbase (concept) tx.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
3/ We’ve seen no evidence of exploitation targeting customers. We were not the only crypto org targeted in this campaign. We are working to notify other orgs we believe were also targeted. We’re also releasing a set of IOCs that orgs can use to evaluate their potential exposure.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
2/ Coinbase was not the target of the warrant and did not receive the ransom or any part of the ransom at any point. We also have no evidence that the funds went through a Coinbase account/wallet.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
4/ If you believe you have been impacted by this attack or you have more intel to share and want to collaborate with us on a response, please reach out to security @coinbase .com. IOCs follow.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
6/ I've also read that because the seizure warrant specified property in the Northern District of California, it had to be targeted at Coinbase. Nope. What this likely means is that the private key is located at one of the many Northern California FBI field offices.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
4/ You can take my word for it, or take the (sworn!) word of the agent who wrote the affidavit: "34. The private key for the Subject Address is in the possession of the FBI in the Northern District of California"
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
@cobie Thanks, @cobie . My team has been investigating since yesterday. Investigations like this are not quick or simple but they are critical to determining the context surrounding those on-chain movements. Transparency is also key, so I will share any findings as soon as we are able.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
Coinbase now supports security keys! Really excited to get this out the door and in the hands of our customers.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
3/ We provided information about them to the DOJ and terminated our employee. Today, these individuals have been criminally charged in the Southern District of New York.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
4 years
@nathanielpopper Secure and resilient key management is a critical part of any crypto company. As an industry, we've seen this first hand not just in terms of the security of the assets, but in terms of the process being resilient to the unavailability of critical executives at the company. 2/6
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
3a/ Graph: ; coinbase concept:
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
1/ Honestly blown away by the amount of positivity and helpfulness I’ve seen in response to my 0-day tweets. We’re planning a detailed blog (except the actual exploit, we’re keeping that close hold until patching can happen) for next week and will probably submit to a con or two.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
4 years
@nathanielpopper There is no one person or team at Coinbase that is required to operate the systems that manage keys. There is no one geography that is critical to key operations (we follow the asteroid principle of resilience design: no one small asteroid should impact our storage systems) 5/6
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
Really excited for this! Introducing Coinbase Security Prompt — a safer and easier way of signing into Coinbase by @coinbase
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
The rise of ransomware has been horrible to behold. Recent high profile attacks on Colonial Pipeline and food processing giant JBS have led to knee jerk calls to ban cryptocurrencies because the attackers demanded to be paid in Bitcoin. /1
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
7/ You can find more details in our updated blog post here:
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
4 years
@nathanielpopper Coinbase from the start has built systems with a Security First mindset, and we've focused on ensuring our systems are never in a position where a critical person or even a critical team could put customer funds at risk. 3/6
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
2/ During our investigation, we identified a Coinbase employee who we suspected improperly shared confidential information about Coinbase’s asset listings. We also identified two non-Coinbase individuals this person appeared to be working with.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
6/ We strongly urge others in the space to hold themselves to these same standards, even if it might be difficult at first. Trust is never given - it is earned.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
4 years
@nathanielpopper We do this by focusing on redundancy and resilience in the design, implementation and operation of key storage systems. There is no one person or team at Coinbase that has access to keys. There is no one person or team at Coinbase that has unilateral control of keys. 4/6
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
1/ ATOs are a real problem. Nearly 25% of U.S. households have been victims, financial losses average $12,000, according to <.01% of Coinbase users experience these events, but they are the most complex cases we deal with
@laurashin
Laura Shin
3 years
Hm, the way this story is framed, it appears to blame Coinbase, but the real culprit is the mobile carriers (or customers having insecure email passwords). By the time Coinbase is involved, it’s too late and there’s pretty much nothing they can do
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
4/ We appreciate the DOJ’s recognition of our help in holding these individuals accountable.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
5/ We are committed to doing our part to ensure that all market participants have access to the same information, which is critical to advancing our mission of promoting economic freedom. We do not hesitate to take action when we find wrongdoing.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
Really proud of the Coinbase Security team for putting on a successful blockchain-focused CTF at Defcon ()! Great participation both at the conference and online. We're keeping the CTF site open, so feel free to try your hand!
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
About to go on stage @codeblue_jp ! Obligatory @elkentaro selfie.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
Nope. We have hundreds of reports of this specific message from non-coinbase customers (feel free to report stuff to security @coinbase .com). However scammers have been extra active in recent months. Here are some ways we’re pushing back and what you can do too:
@ashk4n
ashkan soltani
3 years
Did @coinbase have an undisclosed breach? I keep getting phishing txts to my registered Coinbase number. Could be the result of a 3rd party breach ( @Facebook ?) but also seems targeted - other Coinbase users are getting them too
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
I’m not much of a TV guy, but just saw this spot from our marketing team and it was too good not to share. In crypto winters it’s important to find your reasons to be calm…
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
8 years
I just published “On Phone Numbers and Identity”
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
1 year
Check out a new in depth look at the Euler exploit coming out of our Unit 0x team. Part one (looking at the exploit) is below, part two coming early next week!
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
We just started automatically protecting accounts and emailing customers when we detect a 3rd party data breach that may impact customer account security!
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
7 months
Only scammers demand you pay only with gift cards. Only scammers demand you pay only with Zelle. How about instead: “Only scammers pressure you to do things before you understand them”? If in doubt, take a beat, talk to a friend, be skeptical.
@FTC
FTC
7 months
Only scammers demand you pay only with crypto. Learn more at
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
Ransomware isn’t going away even if cryptocurrencies are banned, so it’s important we focus on what will successfully put ransomware in its place. Read more about how we should address the ransomware crisis in my recent post here: /3
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
some of the really great work our threat intelligence team does!
@_iphelix
Peter Kacherginsky
3 years
Over the past two weeks, Coinbase has been monitoring multiple blockchain security incidents involving a cross-chain protocol, Poly Network and a Japanese crypto exchange @Liquid_global .
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
7 months
Excited to chat with @teddyfuse and @hongkim__ about how Coinbase does institutional grade custody!
@BitwiseInvest
Bitwise
7 months
Tune in Friday at 2:30pm ET for a discussion of custody of bitcoin in ETFs with Bitwise President ( @teddyfuse ), CTO ( @hongkim__ ), and Coinbase’s Chief Security Officer ( @SecurityGuyPhil )
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
7 years
I just published “Update on Meltdown and Spectre”
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
2/ For now, we uploaded the second sample we referenced in the initial tweets (b639bca...) to VT, so have fun taking that apart! For reference, the chain was 0-day -> 23017a55... -> b639bca....
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
But if cryptocurrency went away tomorrow would ransomware end? No. What we need to eradicate this scourge is a more nuanced, multi-pronged strategy that gets to the root cause of the problem. /2
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
10/ They may also cherry pick cold storage addresses and ask us to restore those if they didn’t see enough cold storage activity in a given period…but you all tend to keep us busy enough that we haven’t needed to go there.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
6 years
I'm hiring a security engineering manager at Coinbase (). SF or Chicago. This is the team that owns, among other things, our cold storage implementation () Come build things at a company that really cares about security.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
Solid take on a nuanced issue.
@nicoleperlroth
Nicole Perlroth
3 years
New: Surprise! Bitcoin is not as anonymous as cybercriminals think. In some ways it's actually been a blessing to law enforcement. with the best @eringriffith @ktbenner
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
7 years
I just published “Moving to Expect-CT”
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
7/ You may be wondering why Coinbase doesn’t move all funds on-chain every year. Well, we’ve built systems and processes that allow our auditors to assess control over keys without that and then they can randomly sample just a small subset of addresses each year.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
4/ Ultimately, the best way for a consumer to protect themselves against ATOs anywhere is to use the strongest 2fa available (sms < totp < yubikey) and a password manager. See also:
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
8 years
I just published “How to safely store digital currency with Coinbase”
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
7 years
I'll be speaking at @shakacon on IR in a containerized, ephemeral, immutable world. Come join us in beautiful HI!
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
6 years
“The PWNed Watch: Security at Coinbase is a top priority and that includes helping protect our employees’ personal information. This is a prototype for an optional tool for Coinbase employees to register their personal information to…” —  @NamrataGanatra
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
8/ In short: at key generation time, we sign a message with the private key, allowing us to prove we generated it. We then exhaustively define our cold storage system controls so auditors can test those controls (e.g. all cold storage keys are backed up before being put into use)
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
3/ First, assets have different serialization methods and not all assets have a built-in message signing capability. So in order to sign messages you’d need to implement custom code for assets that don’t have that function.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
7 years
I just published “Coinbase Loves Bug Bounties”
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
Finally, we write a lot more about how to recognize scams on the Coinbase blog and you can check out the brand new Crypto Security Basics article by the amazing @the_mullinator at .
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
4/ This is important because there is nothing auditors hate more than custom processes. It leads to the potential for gaps, which can call into question the entire audit. So auditors will always look for the lowest common denominator for their audit procedures.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
5/ Second, I would consider it bad practice to build a high security asset storage system with a mode that allows for arbitrary serialized payloads to be signed. That would be a function begging for abuse by an attacker.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
9/ Come audit time, the auditors verify the controls are functioning as intended, verify the signed messages and review cold restores over the audit period to make sure we moved enough funds over time to provide appropriate assurance.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
6 years
Really love this thread. So often when we look at a security problem in blockchain @coinbase we think hard about history. It rarely repeats but rhymes all the time. Thanks for the perspective @philvenables
@philvenables
Phil Venables
6 years
Technology. A thread. In the late 1980’s I was a developer using virtualized systems and containers, software defined networks, thin-client end points that could graphically render serialized content in a standard mark-up language.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
2/ At scale, differences in listed assets really start to drag on you in a bunch of ways. One of the ways is audit procedures. While in theory you can sign a message with any private key, there are some practical blockers to that.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
3/ We know we have a lot of work to do to make the experience better for those customers who do experience an ATO, and we’ve launched live phone support immediately as a first step.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
We saw a huge spike in scam calls spoofing Coinbase’s support number, so we added that number to the Do Not Originate list. Remember: Coinbase does not make unsolicited outbound calls. If you get a call claiming to be from Coinbase then hang up, it’s a scam.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
Coinbase *does* send SMS notifications. Any links we send in messages about your account will always be for domains and not use URL shorteners. If you see an SMS that does otherwise, it’s a scam, forward it to 7726 (SPAM) to report it.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
6 years
Cryptocurrency Security: where “but does that really happen outside the NSA?” becomes “oh crap, that just happened!”. If that sounds like fun, you should check out
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
@CoinbaseSupport is the only account on twitter that you should interact with if you’re looking for support. If a twitter account other than that one offers you support then report it (to twitter or us), it’s a scam.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
4 years
@octal @nathanielpopper Yep, fully agree on the need for a crypto security standard. This is something we’re working on, but cue obligatory XKCD standards comic. We do have a SOC2, type II that covers key mgmt for our custody business, but those are detailed/sensitive and not broadly shareable docs...
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
2 years
6/ Even arbitrary text-only payloads would be an interesting loophole to try to exploit.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
6 years
This is perhaps the most scientific treatment I’ve ever seen of breach impact forecast. Bravo @Magoo
@Magoo
Ryan McGeehan
6 years
I took a crack at forecasting monthly revenue impact a specific SaaS company would face if they experienced a security incident and it was handled (very well | ok | horribly). Would love helpful feedback. Thanks!
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
7 years
@mmurray I think the Democratic Party gig is much harder. Everyone @coinbase understands that security is foundational; not as sure about DNC.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
8 years
My team and I are doing a Reddit AMA today at 10 am PDT. Join us!
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
6 years
Some of the great work the security team at Coinbase does all the time. Sound like fun? Come join us...
@coinbase
Coinbase 🛡️
6 years
Users of the Electrum Wallet, a popular desktop Bitcoin client, have been under a persistent attack since December 2018. Coinbase Blockchain Security Engineer, Peter Kacherginsky, has been tracking the phishing campaigns on the Electrum network. Read more:
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
8 years
Keystone Metrics in DevOps: The 30 Day Project @ Coinbase
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
8 years
Awesome job @alexcpsec !
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
6 years
@Ronin43 @brian_armstrong @Helghardt We use several physical sources of randomness xor’d together to generate the stream of random data we use for keygen. One of those sources is actually based on quantum tunneling of photons. Not quite light from Andromeda, but still pretty cool.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
Coinbase support will never do any of the above, so if you hear any of those then hang up, it’s a scam. Feel free to tell us how you encountered the scam so we can disrupt these scammers: security @coinbase .com.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
@5aelo @mozsec @coinbase a little more context here:
@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
5 years
1/ A little more context on the Firefox 0-day reports. On Monday, Coinbase detected & blocked an attempt by an attacker to leverage the reported 0-day, along with a separate 0-day firefox sandbox escape, to target Coinbase employees.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
7 years
@jmoconnor415 @coinbase @globalsign @CiscoSecurity Thanks @jmoconnor415 we've been working in takedowns for these domains and certs since they flagged in our systems around 3 AM (PST). Still pending actions from the various involved parties (including @globalsign )
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
3 years
When interacting with someone that claims to be Coinbase support, look out for the following red flags: Asking for control of your computer Asking you to install software (e.g. TeamViewer) Asking for your password or 2fa codes Asking you to send cryptocurrency anywhere
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
7 years
Come help us continue to get Security right as we scale.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
8 years
@hmhackmaster I've had this request enough that we're cleaning it up and will publish in the next couple days.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
8 years
@rwitoff Such an awesome exercise. Can't control when an incident happens, only how prep'd we are. #security #practice
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
8 years
@jumbograms Awesome! That is exactly what I was going for.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
7 years
@estark37 @patricktoomey Will update Coinbase tomorrow
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
7 years
@timpastoor @lightcoin @diiorioanthony @ErikVoorhees Google Fi also seems to be a cut above the legacy carriers in terms of social engineering resistance. Also good international coverage.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
7 years
@cryps1s Heh. Buy me a beer, I'll tell you stories.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
6 years
@Helghardt @brian_armstrong We actually talk a fair bit about keygen in this wired article: . In general, you’re right that there are a ton of considerations and edge cases in this kind of real world application of cryptography.
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@SecurityGuyPhil
Philip Martin
7 years
@zmanian I do, and am chatting with @paddyucl
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