There are many bad actors in the world of cryptocurrency, and we realize this as we experience it. Unfortunately, these painful experiences often result in financial losses for thousands, even tens of thousands of investors. But the latest revelation is more about the privacy of personal data and those who believe that any means are justified to achieve their goals. Crypto Leaks is once again on the agenda.
Confessions of Arkham
Crypto Leaks targeted Arkham in its ninth file. Arkham was identifying the wallet addresses by taking advantage of the vulnerabilities in the Binance and FTX cryptocurrency exchanges. The confessions of the engineer in the published video will make you wonder what else we will see.
Binance is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange with 128 million registered users as of the end of 2022. Arkham Intelligence provides blockchain intelligence services. The Arkham platform can identify the cryptocurrency wallet addresses of targeted individuals for its clients. If this is limited to open-source intelligence, there is no problem. However, taking advantage of vulnerabilities in Binance and FTX exchanges makes them guilty.
Arkham claims that it can identify people’s cryptocurrency addresses using public information and “artificial intelligence.” The part we call public information is already OSINT, which is open-source intelligence. However, the issue of detection with artificial intelligence is very dubious. This raises the question of whether a cover has been found for data obtained through illegal methods.
The Dark Side of Crypto
Crypto Leaks published a video in which Arkham’s key engineer Kamil Szczerba explains how they exploited the operations of Binance and FTX. This situation, which is contrary to the service conditions of the exchanges, also falls into the category of intelligence activities. If X intelligence organization collects the data of a citizen or even a bureaucrat of country Y, it becomes a bigger crime.
Crypto Leaks also published evidence supporting possible intentional violations of US securities laws by Arkham and other unethical behaviors, including attempts to isolate Kamil from the outside world.
We Have a Request from You
Kamil Szczerba, who made the confessions, worked as a software engineer at Arkham Intelligence between June and October 2022. Shortly after starting work, Kamil was asked to open an account on FTX and Binance exchanges. This account was actually used by Arkham, and shortly after, he was asked to authorize various transactions from his phone.
He said he would do these “little things” they wanted as long as he didn’t go to jail. But he had questions in his mind. He spoke to CTO Henry Fisher.
Later, he realized that his account was exploited through a system vulnerability, and his cryptocurrency addresses were matched with email addresses and real identities. We remember that there was an API exploit during the airdrop period. This allowed the association of Arkham’s account with Twitter (X) addresses. What was missed during this leak was why the company had an API structure that allowed this matching.
Kamil said:
“They told me they would pay the lawyers’ fees. Arkham also stole personal data from FTX. Arkham also found a backdoor on FTX, extracting its users’ personal data, including information that would anonymize transactions. Yes, they were collecting data.”
After closing his account, the CEO asked another employee to open an account.
There are too many details, but all of this shows us that the gray area in crypto gives courage to criminals. This is seriously concerning. By the way, the ARKM Token price is currently at $0.372, just above its all-time low.
