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Hackers attacking the cryptocurrency users

The crypto-currency and digital asset markets mature, so have hackers' approaches to asset owners, compromising exchanges and other parts for the crypto-financial ecosystem. Whereas crypto-currencies' role in attacks used to simply be ransomware payments, the market has changed. In leveraging crypto-currency for the ransomware payments, hackers have had to educate themselves on these systems, giving them awareness and understanding for various platforms in the space, the security controls they do and do not have in place or their potential weaknesses.

Very long time ago, the banks, credit unions and other financial services have had to perform for the customer due diligence also called ‘know your customer (KYC)’, to comply with anti-money laundering (AML) laws. And while many exchanges, particularly ones that serve United State citizens and customers in other developed countries, already do this same know your customer (KYC) process, the global nature for crypto-currency means that not all exchanges (such as the Russian-based Suex, which was sanctioned) and other financial ecosystem providers are operating under these rules. Global crypto exchanges that want to maintain credibility must implement some of the same controls used by banks and others to ensure they know of their customers and the nature of their transactions.

Do not Sleep on Phishing Threats

The cybercrime life cycle, we probably all have received from the email of an imposter posing as a bank we do business with asking us to log in and verify something on our account. If you do log in and provide the requested credentials, you quickly fall victim to the phishing scam. So how have these phishing attacks made their way into the crypto world? Crypto wallets, which store your private keys aiming to keep your crypto safe and accessible, have become popular and particularly multicurrency wallets. The problem is their applications are simply copied because they are Web-based and elements that are Web-based (such as Chrome extension) allowing you to connect to your wallet through an app on your desktop, making them prime targets for phishing attacks. If, you seen at how banks and other large financial institutions are normally attacked, you know the bad actor is going to set up for the phishing site and drive traffic there through advertising, SEO results, mass emails and more. The crypto community, nevertheless, is suffering from one-on-one support scams. Fully understanding how crypto-currency works is very hard for the average customer. Often, people seek answers by going to support forums such as the Exodus wallet forum on Reddit and Telegram. There, customer can get real-time answers from the people who are either in support and use the wallet. But there are phishers in there, too, and these scammers try to manipulate the customer into providing them of their actual login information and driving the customer to a phishing page that mirrors a support page. It isn’t the same issue banks face, in that the losses are real, but for crypto exchanges it is the reputational loss that will catch up to them.

Mitigate Your Risk

In recently, the crypto market is crowded and phishers know that. Fake Google ads are becoming for more popular phishing method and these phishing pages are now getting ranked above the legit crypto and wallet homepage in a Google search. It is simple to miss if you are not specifically looking for it. When the first search result is a phishing site, the customer clicks on it, needs to recover a password, and the next thing you know your customer is now a victim. Crypto exchanges need to implement security services that not only monitor for the fake ads and phishing sites but offer remediation and take-down services. Email protection is also key for the crypto exchanges. If the wallet administrator gets spear-phished, the attacker can piece together access for the wallets on the exchange and ultimately access the fund.

Cryptocurries: immutable and hackable

Many crypto accounts are locked down by unbreakable cryptography and a private key; a string of letters or numbers - that serves for the identification code for each crypto account holder. But hackers have shown that block-chains aren’t immutable. If the hackers get access to the wallet, they will be able to crack the private key to the account, which is another way of crypto hacking.

The law and crypto hacking

The various countries have deemed crypto hacking illegal. The most common types of crypto hacking are phishing and social engineering attacks. Nevertheless, when it comes to 51 percent attacks, there aren’t many laws that prevent miners from taking control for more than 50 per cent of a network’s computing power. Though rare, more devastating attacks happen where smart contracts get hacked and exploited, giving the hacker access to large parts of a crypto company's accounts and systems, said Huobi Global. They are able to steal crypto tokens worth millions at one go. Nevertheless, hackings can be goodwill gestures too. For instance, when the hacker does it to point out security vulnerability in a smart contract so that the spiteful person doesn’t hack and steal the funds, causing losses to everyone.

How to prevent such attacks? Such hacks can be prevented by tightening the security processes. And it comes at many levels. Here are a few tips recommended by experts to minimize the risk in decentralized finance (DeFi) such as:

Use separate wallet addresses: By using the separate wallet addresses for each platform, you minimize your exposure to the loss. Even if one platform is hacked, the other would be safe. Do not put all your tokens in the same wallet.

Two-step authentication: Always activate a two-factor authentication system to secure your transactions. That’ll provide an extra layer of security to your wallet and exchange.

Check your wallet approvals regularly: If, you are no longer staking in a DeFi project, cancel the access rights for that project to your wallets.

Proper wallet management: The majority of your funds should sit in secure multi-sig cold storage wallets. Hot wallets, which are responsible for the automating withdrawals, should have minimal funds because they’re the most susceptible to hacks.

Keep off phishing links: These are ideally malicious ads and emails that duplicate affiliated organizations or identities that attempt to get your personal data for hacking for application level, add mandatory two-factor authentication checks for sensitive operations.