Current Threat Landscape of Cryptocurrency's Ecosystem: It's time to upgrade security skills set to bridge the big gap
As we seeing growing threats against Cryptocurrency Wallets, Cryptocurrency Mining Platforms and Cryptocurrency Exchanges, but no real threat against Cryptocurrency Blockchain so far.
During this year 2018 we have seen attackers playing more around targeting Cryptocurrency Wallets and Mining Platforms but less focused on Cryptocurrency Exchanges.
This year only two Cryptocurrency Exchanges (CoinCheck in Japan & CoinRail in South Korea) were targeted which didn't cause much impact on Cryptocurrency market because attack was only directed towards Hot Wallets but not on actual Cryptocurrency Exchange.
They were hacked just because of two reasons:-
1. Both exchanges ( Coincheck & Coinrail) stored an unusually large amount of crypto assets in their hot wallets, or wallets connected to the internet, instead of cold wallets stored offline.
(Note:- Hot wallets are like checking accounts while cold wallets are similar to savings accounts. People who have digital assets keep a small amount of money in their hot wallets for purchasing stuff, whereas the vast majority of their digital coins in their cold wallet.)
2. "Coincheck" (in Japan) admitted that its $500 million security breach was a result of the lack of talented and experienced developers working on the platform’s security systems. Whereas, "Coinrail" (in South Korea) also admitted after its breach that it did not have enough resources and developers to fix and improve its security system.
So above points highlights that they had security breach due to lack of security skills and they lose money due to their Hot Wallets holding unusual big crypto assets, instead of storing it in Cold Wallets.
By considering current threat landscape of cryptocurrency's ecosystem, we as a security professionals seriously need to upgrade our security skills set to stay ready to face biggest and painful threat against cryptocurrency blockchain in future. We hope not to have this hard time in near future.
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