The cryptocurrency heists soaring as hackers steal £577m in six months and briefly:
- a record amount of cryptocurrency has been stolen from online exchanges in the first half of 2018
- cybersecurity start-up CipherTrace said that the amount of cryptocurrency being stolen and used in money laundering in the first half of 2018 was already three times the amount stolen in the whole of 2017
- company said that it had found that $761m (£577m) had been laundered since the start of the year from cryptocurrency exchanges
- for all of 2017, the company found that $266m was stolen.
Ilia Kolochenko, CEO and founder of web security company High-Tech Bridge commented below.
Ilia Kolochenko, CEO and founder at High-Tech Bridge:
“Cybercriminals follow easy money, and many cryptocurrency owners are the perfect victims. They are virtually unable to protect either themselves or their digital assets, being susceptible even to relatively simple phishing attacks. Law enforcement is frequently uninterested in investigating and prosecuting petty offences with digital coins theft, as they are already under water with highly-sophisticated nationwide hacks. While crypto startups are virtually ignorant even to the fundamentals of cybersecurity, spending all their efforts and resources to survive on extremely volatile and highly-competitive market.
“Therefore, we can almost certainly expect further proliferation of security incidents related to crypto currencies. Attackers have now established impressive infrastructure purposely tailored for large-scale theft and scams with digital coins. Owners of the crypto assets, should remain extremely vigilant, maintain all their devices and installed software up2date, install at least a free antivirus from a reputable vendor, use two-factor authentication and unique passwords, and never entrust their wallets to any third-parties unless they have a very good reason to utterly trust them.”
