BitMEX Reveals Some Users’ Email IDs Making Amateurish Mistake

Cryptocurrency derivatives exchange BitMEX today sent a mass email to its users with their email addresses in the “To” field, affecting their privacy.”

Cryptocurrency derivatives exchange BitMEX sent a mass email to its users on Friday with all of their email addresses in the “To” field. Usually, when you are sending a mass e-mail and you want to protect other users’ privacy, you put their e-mail addresses in the so-called blind carbon copy or BCC field. That’s how the other users’ e-mail addresses stay hidden from everybody else. This way, by not putting the names in the BCC field but in an amateurish manner dividing them by the comma, BitMEX directly affected its users’ privacy.

Confirming the issue, BitMEX announced on Friday that it is “aware that some of our users have received a general user update email earlier today, which contained the email addresses of other users,” adding that their “team have acted immediately to contain the issue and we are taking steps to understand the extent of the impact. Rest assured that we are doing everything we can to identify the root cause of the fault and we will be in touch with any users affected by the issue”.

“The privacy of our users is a top priority and we are very sorry for the concern this has caused to our users,” highlights the team.

⚠️We are aware of a large-scale user email leak from another exchange.⚠️ If you are one of the affected users and you also have a Binance account under the same email address, we recommend changing your email immediately using the below steps:https://t.co/sgEr5sqleg — Binance (@binance) November 1, 2019

A Twitter user with the handle @sakuraricebird shared screenshots of the email, which shows several email IDs of BitMEX’s customers.

えええ…BITMEXさんこれはいかんでしょ…ほんとに… pic.twitter.com/SxkUDv3kG2 — 桜文鳥 (@sakuraricebird) November 1, 2019

 

Indices Updates

Earlier today, BitMEX said it will be implementing major changes to the weights of its indices later this month. The exchange says this update is something that it had to make in order to make sure that users trade against a reference price that “more closely reflects the market consensus price of underlying assets.”

With the new indices that are set go live on November 22, published details show that some of the most important differences regard the introduction of data from three new index-component exchanges and also as a design to make indices show how the mass for exchanges with bigger capacities is rising.

BitMEX’s existing indices, at the time, are using data from six exchanges — Binance, Bitstamp, Bittrex, Coinbase, Kraken and Poloniex, and now has plans to be enlarged to add three more: Huobi, Gemini and Itbit.

From the company, they explain that measuring the indices proportionally to exchange trade volume data will “ensure that BitMEX index prices are more representative of the trade price per trade than per exchange.”

It is describing this method for each index:

“BitMEX observes the traded volumes of the underlying asset, obtained directly via API connection, across each exchange in the constituent universe. Proprietary mechanisms are used to identify malformed and anomalous data, which is discarded. The BitMEX index weights are computed using this volume data with the calculation removing constituents with insufficient trade volume.”

Be it as it may, BitMEX stresses that it takes no responsibility for the precision of the exact volume (or other) data collected from the index-constituent exchanges.

In the light of the new changes, BitMEX decided to present a new array of so-called “NEXT” indices, which shall, therefore, show the theoretical prices of the anticipated indices in their newly-weighted condition. This should enable traders to learn and better understand the possible impact this could have on the changes to come.