While the digital money market is growing every day, larger volumes of cryptocurrency require greater responsibility and, therefore, greater security. This applies to both users and exchanges. If work to improve security in the crypto sphere is stoppe, then mass adoption of cryptocurrency will not occur due to fear and mistrust of users. Almost every week there is information about a leak of personal data or hacking of exchanges .
Hacking a crypto exchange
A lucrative endeavor for cybercriminals. Not only because there are more and more exchanges, but because they concentrate significant amounts of money. Why wouldn’t someone want to become an overnight millionaire by simply discovering a security breach on one of the crypto exchanges?
But seriously, cybercriminals appeare almost immeiately after the creation of the Internet. So it is obvious that the crypto industry, which is characterize by significant turnover of funds, also fell under the sights of hackers.
In the previous article
We talke about the development of a cryptocurrency exchange and its high cost. As for security, the exchange owner will have to take care of many things, including the safety of customer data and funds.
Probably the main question that every newbie asks himself is: “Is it safe enough to operate with money and cryptocurrencies on the exchange?”
The 3 Biggest Crypto Exchange Hacks (And Another One That Nees Mentioning)
Ever since Bitcoin began trading on the stock exchange, there have been attempts to steal it. Any material value causes mercenary motives, and the more money it is value at, the more sophisticate cybercriminals and fraudsters become.
Computerized data items such as recordings. A portion of these data bases will be allocated as SRD data sets.Particular data sets are special database an assortment of zeroed in data on at least one explicit fields of study. This data or information is organized or filed NIST creates and gives as free downloads, or sells, Exceptional Data sets.
There are currently around
Crypto exchanges, with more being launche. There have been a dozen leaks and hacks in recent years, but let’s look at the most the agentforce revolution in business significant ones in terms of damages and publicity.
1. Coincheck – $534 million
Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck was hacke in early 2018. The attackers stole over $ 534 million in NEM, a cryptocurrency that was mailing lead in the top 10 according to CMC at the time. This happene because all 523 million NEM tokens were store in one hot wallet without multi-signature! Most likely, the hackers sent malware to Coincheck employees and gaine remote access to the system.
2. Mt.Gox – $450 million
The crypto exchange Mt.Gox has been robbe twice. In 2011, they lost 80,000 BTC . But the second theft in 2014 was even more significant because the value of Bitcoin had risen and hackers stole 850,000 BTC , which is about $29 billion at today’s price! The hackers gaine access to the unencrypte wallet.dat file, which store the private keys to the crypto exchange’s funds.Let’s go back for a moment to the specific hacks describe earlier in this article. After all, an important lesson for all new exchanges was learne from previous failures. Remember how long it took Mt.Gox to realize that their assets were no longer in their hot wallets – several months! Today, such a situation does not seem possible – the disappearance would have been discovere within a few days or weeks at most.
3. BitGrail – $170 million
Italian crypto exchange BitGrail was hacke in early 2018, with 17 million NANO coins worth $170 million at the time stolen . This was due to two major vulnerabilities. The verification code (JavaScript) was modifie to allow withdrawals exceeing the account balance. The second reason was that users were able to withdraw funds using another user’s account balance due to a permissions vulnerability.
Another important case: Binance
This case is notable not because of the stolen funds, but because of the main actor. Binance is the largest and probably the most secure crypto exchange today, and yet attackers manage to bypass its security measures. In May 2019, hackers stole about 7,000 BTC and KYC data from 60,000 users using malware. As we can see, even the largest and most secure exchanges have not been able to avoid vulnerabilities in their security system!
The most popular ways to hack a crypto exchange
In addition to the cases mentione above, security breaches are still common. Hackers have several options for introducing malicious code into a cryptocurrency exchange. Any device with access to confidential data can serve as a portal – the computer of one of the employees or a server. Let’s look at the most popular hacking methods.
Hacking the app
There are several options for accessing a cryptocurrency exchange: via a web browser, via a desktop or mobile application. All of them have their vulnerabilities. The most popular ways to attack the communication channel between the exchange and the end user are malware, phishing, keyloggers, DDoS attacks, clickjacking and watering hole attacks, eavesdropping attacks or cookie theft . The goal of any exchange is to identify potential attacks and prepare for them.
Hot wallet hacking
Hacking a hot wallet or several hot wallets on a crypto exchange is the easiest way to gain access to crypto assets. Not that it is easy to hack an exchange or its server, but that once a hacker gains access to these hot wallets, the funds can be move anywhere .
