What Happened
In April 2022, a data breach at AlphaEx, a defunct cryptocurrency trading platform that had wound up in August 2021, exposed the personal information of approximately 5,000 individuals. The breach, which was discovered on the dark web, compromised driver’s licenses, passports, proof of age documents, and national identity card images. The exposure affected 232 Australians and 24 New Zealanders, with the breach attributed to a misconfiguration in the platform’s security rather than an active attack. According to cybersecurity experts, the breach likely occurred because the site’s operators had abandoned the platform after it ceased operations, leaving it without security updates and vulnerable to exploitation through backdoors.
