A hacker hijacked BlackWallet to steal nearly £300K from Bitcoin rival Stellar Lumen; an incident that Ilia Kolochenko, CEO of web security company High Tech Bridge commented below.
Ilia Kolochenko, CEO at High Tech Bridge:
“Unfortunately, startups in digital currencies and other blockchain technologies often ignore or underestimate information security and privacy fundamentals. They operate on a very competitive and extremely fluctuative market, and just don’t have enough resources and time to take care of cybersecurity.
Changes and updates go into production every hour, without the necessary security validation and testing of new code. Competition is always behind, price of currencies skyrocket and fall down, customers ask new features, regulators announce new rules – it’s a realm of uncontrolled chaos.
While such negligence is understandable, it will unlikely provide any justification in case of a breach. Civil damages claimed by the victims can be very important, while the impending enforcement of GDPR in May will impose additional fines for such carelessness.”
