As the cryptocurrency market has exploded in the last 10 years, so has the number of security breaches and cyberattacks trying to take advantage of its growth.
According to a new report from Invezz, between January 2011 and December 2021, approximately € 12,1 billion worth of cryptocurrencies were stolen in Japan, South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom. China is the countries with the most security holes. .
When it comes to how such an amount of money was stolen, exploiting vulnerabilities in the crypto exchange's security systems was the most common tactic with € 3,18 billion lost in security breaches, € 1,76 billion stolen from through decentralized finance hacks (DeFi) and € 7,12 billion lost through crypto. scams.
At the same time, crypto scams increased 850% between 2011 and 2021 and this year saw the highest number of scams with 76 in total. However, the largest increase in the number of scams occurred between 2016 and 2017 (180%), when some of the most serious cyberattacks occurred.
The (* 10 *) cryptocurrency security holes
The 2014 hack on the Japanese crypto exchange Mt. Gox is still the biggest in history after all these years. However, this was the second time the exchange was hacked, as it was the victim of a similar attack in 2011 when € 8,75 million worth of Bitcoin was lost. In 2014, Mt. Gox lost almost 850.000 bitcoins (equivalent to € 615 million) after hackers flooded the exchange with a massive amount of fake bitcoins.
The second biggest cryptocurrency security breach occurred in August this year when the blockchain-based Poly Network platform received the theft of more than € 600 million worth of cryptocurrencies. Fortunately, most of those funds were returned and the platform offered a job to the responsible white hat hacker.
In January 2018, hackers infiltrated the Coincheck exchange and stole € 534 million worth of cryptocurrencies. They did this by accessing active wallets during a phishing attack before distributing malware to extract the funds. While Coincheck suffered the third largest cryptocurrency security breach in the past decade, the exchange is still operational and was even acquired by Japanese financial services provider Monex Group in April 2021.
Invezz cryptocurrency analyst Milko Trajcevski explained why keeping your coins in a cryptocurrency wallet like Ledger Nano X is the best way to protect them, saying:
“The main thing that we all need to be aware of as cryptocurrency investors is the fact that as long as you keep your cryptocurrency tokens in the exchange wallet that you are directly using, they will be in danger. Hackers and bad actors are constantly pushing for new ways to compromise the security of these exchanges, and while they are quite secure and even promise safe and cold storage options, it still carries a slight level of risk. The best and only way to keep your cryptocurrency tokens as secure as possible is to store them in a private cryptocurrency wallet. A private cryptocurrency wallet is a wallet in which you have full control over the private keys of that wallet. Also, you can go one step further and invest in a private cryptocurrency wallet, but the general idea here is to keep your tokens off of an exchange, where you have full ownership and control of them.
We also introduce the best password manager and best antivirus software.
Via Invezz