Following the news that Hackers have stolen Bitcoin funds from Bithumb exchange traders, Robert Block, Senior VP of Identity Strategy at SecureAuth commented below.
Robert Block, Senior VP of Identity Strategy at SecureAuth:
“This latest attack is troublesome on a variety of levels. Firstly, this continues to demonstrate the weakness associated with poor password hygiene especially when they are the only factor of authentication. If Bithumb had implemented adaptive authentication using layers such as device recognition and/or geolocation as part of the authentication process for its employees, this issue could have been avoided entirely as a second factor of authentication would have been introduced. Additionally, if identity-based threat services were in place, Bithumb would have been able to identify this issue in February when the it first occurred and notified other areas in cyber security. Instead, this breach went undiscovered until June giving the attackers months for lateral movement and additional credential exposure.
“It shows how attackers are carefully watching the fruitful bitcoin market and will continue to target these types of organisations in the future as they are fully aware of the high-value monetary gain associated with it.
“Authentication as an industry must be approached differently. With 81 percent of data breaches attributed to attackers walking through the front door with stolen credentials, organisations must move towards the new approach of aggressively moving away from passwords through the usage of adaptive authentication and identity-based threat detection to strengthen security without burdening the end user.”
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