Cybercrime

Currency Data Provider ‘Open Exchange Rates’ Discloses Breach

Currency data provider Open Exchange Rates has started informing customers that their information was likely stolen by hackers.

Eduard Kovacs

March 13, 2020

Currency data provider Open Exchange Rates has started informing customers that their information was likely stolen by hackers.

Open Exchange Rates provides a currency data API that is used by over 80,000 web developers. According to its website, companies such as Shopify, Etsy, Kickstarter, Baintree and Coinbase use the API.

In emails sent to affected individuals, the company said hackers obtained a secure access key for its AWS infrastructure from a third-party IT services provider. The attacker then used that key to access Open Exchange Rates’ network, including a database storing user data.

The breach was discovered on March 2, after some of the company’s customers complained that requests to the API were resulting in timeouts. An investigation revealed that an unauthorized user had made changes to the company’s AWS environment.

The attacker apparently gained initial access on February 9, and evidence suggests that they exfiltrated the user database.

Open Exchange Rates said the database contained information such as name, email address, hashed account passwords, IP address, app ID, and, where provided, personal and business name and address, country of residence, and website address.

“There is no evidence to suggest that information relating to you was specifically targeted during the incident. However, our investigations have found that some of your information is contained in this database and therefore would have been accessible to the unauthorized third party,” Open Exchange Rates told customers.

In response to the incident, the company has reset all user passwords and customers have been advised to generate new app IDs, which are used to query exchange rate information from the service.

“Our AWS architecture has been designed according to the best practices for secure, high-availability services. This was a sophisticated attack, made possible by a data security breach at a third-party supplier, and we deeply regret that a compromised access key was able to facilitate unauthorised access in this way, resulting in the first security incident in our 8-year history,” the firm said.

SecurityWeek has reached out to the company to find out how many users were affected by the breach.

Written By Eduard Kovacs

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

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