Trick Or Treat
On the night of the 31st October, a few large crypto derivatives exchanges experienced dramatic events.
Users of the BitMEX exchange received an email detailing how BitMEX will update their indices with prices from Huobi having more dominance. This email had contained a number of ‘reply-to’ emails corresponding to other users of the BitMEX platform.
I found 16981 unique email addresses associated with users of the BitMEX platform.
The Hero Crypto Needs but it doesn’t deserve
TheCrypt0Mask aka (The Mask) unearthed 995 email addresses associated in the leak and tracked down ones with explicit password vulnerabilities using some complex analytical and programming prowess. They then went on to inform these users of their vulnerabilities and advised them on what they should do in lieu of these. After conferring with myself they ran this scan across over 2000 email addresses, finding even more vulnerable users and acting accordingly.
Burning the Midnight Oil
I collated a list of 16981 bitMEX email addresses from the Leak all submitted within 24 hours of the BitMEX email and referencing that in their submission of the email addresses. based on the data I ran an analysis on the type of email (e.g. protonmail, gmail, .edu, .gov) and the approximate ratio of male — to — female users on the platform using this sample size of 16981 email addresses
1408 unique email address domains detected
The distribution of email domains used is displayed in the graph below
Within this vast universe of email clients we find a few email domains belonging to public sector institutions ending with .gov and university institutions ending with .edu within multiple jurisdictions
From this sample size of 16981 users we can see that most of the users are signing in with a gmail email addresses. What’s interesting is that some users are signing in with their icloud credentials.
Male-To-Female Ratio
By analysing the names within these email addresses, I ran an NLTK (Natural Language ToolKit) algorithm to determine the rough representation of male to female names detected in the email addresses
The Industry Response
Despite the events that have unfolded over the last 24 hours, the community has responded with resilience, strength, and a continued willingness to operate as normal whilst remaining cautious of new challenges on the horizon. BitMEX is still churning out over $2 billion dollars in Notional Daily trading Volume and has traded over $50 billion in October alone. Nothing has really changed, the unexpected is expected, and new competitors are emerging.
