re: Cointerra being quoted as shipping out december boxes & 'the hack'
I just called Cointerra just now. hung up a few seconds ago. This info is hot off the press! They said it was ok to put something up cos they're very busy right now in fire fighting mode.
here's what i heard from the horses mouth... just now.
1. they're very busy dealing with the aftermath of a serious hack on their web site this weekend. It was a serious fraud & the authorities are now involved. whoever attacked them did so to steal cash from customers & cointerra. You can see from the notice cointerra put up on their web site that some customers were contacted and asked to pay to a particular bitcoin address in order to speed up their delivery slot or asked to convert from wire xfer to bitcoin payment. Cointerra has collected a lot of information about the hack and are in the process of dealing with it. Some of the Cointerra folks have been up all night and are tired and weary. I spoke to an extremely tired senior guy (who shall remain nameless) who is in the thick of it.
2. Contrary to a mistaken article in The Register published today, they have NOT sent out all the december customer boxes yet. the article misquoted cointerra in several ways. its unfortunate as other articles have now come out, literally reprinting what theregister said. cointerra has asked the register to print a retraction or fix the article. not sure if and when they will do so. I've already seen changes in the article so i think they're doing something about the errors.
Confirming, in case its not already obvious...
Since I am an early customer, and some of you are too.. we'd be very concerned to hear that they had shipped out our boxes, when they clearly haven't!!
As far as I'm aware, only one box was collected in person (by Jake, an early customer).. and apparently hundreds are in production as we speak as they ramp up two factories to produce these things.
im not sure when they will start customer shipments, but hopefully in the coming week. I'm positive we would've been notified when they actually ship as they use UPS and similar couriers.
If anyone wants me to ask them any more questions to ask them directly, ask away and i will try and get some answers... But know that their priority (today at least) is dealing with the hack and making sure customers data, and orders are safe. Making sure they find out if anyone paid the hackers instead of cointerra for hardware purchases in the last few days etc.
more news, as i hear it.
Honestly if they try to use the hack as a reason to slow down shipping for more investigation then I'm afraid that a company as advanced as they are is producing equipment. They have not said that of course but if it does become a delay of shipping because of that then something REALLY bad behind the scenes is going on.
Researching the hack could take sometime (but should only be the customer service people trying to get orders straight) but they do not do credit card processing, their bitcoin wallet is hopefully mostly cold storage or not accessible just by being on their network, etc... They could have gained access to bounce emails off the servers but if there is no information in exchange that emails were sent from an internal source then it was spoofing on that part. They did have access to the customer email user base. Though if none of the addresses were changed in the customer info the hack wasn't that extreme (or done by anyone who knows WTF to do).
Our company does offer Sophos and a few other firewall options besides our main products IBM and even our personal office we have had plenty of failed attacks to even make it PAST the firewall. Hell my home connection I'd put money on that the SAME person that did Cointerra couldn't get in to. I run a simple Sophos client at my house instead of a router. The point was to get in and scam people not take any top secret knowledge and even then if it was email access they only got into then more than likely they were not patching Exchange servers or their webhost wasn't doing so.
I can double check today if there were any major pushouts for that.
Regardless I hope customer service cane help all those that did get scammed. That is the part that is truly bullshit and I feel bad for those people 100% as well. Hell even the Cointerra members that do have to go back and help people that got screwed!