DailyPost 633
CRYPTO CURRENCY EXCHANGE HACKED!
If one has to really follow a technology’s success, follow the criminals, they are the first adopters & the first indicators of the current trend, from the internet to Blockchain’s best manifestation, crypto currency, most famous being Bitcoin. Naturally, the hackers are moving in that direction. Hacking Crypto Exchanges is becoming more frequent. The latest one is the Bithumb Crypto Exchange hack in South Korea. South Korea happens is a leading crypto currency user.
On Wednesday, around $31 million in crypto currency was stolen from Bithumb. News has emerged that XRP, the native token of the XRP ledger has been targeted. It happens to be the third largest crypto currency in the world. Bithumb accounted for 10% of the total global trading in XRP in the last 24 hours. Bithumb crypto exchange is second in South Korea and sixth globally. On 11th June 2018, another South Korean crypto currency exchange, CoinRail was hacked. Earlier this year, a similar theft of more than half a billion dollars took place at Japan’s exchange, CoinCheck.
Bithumb has decided to make good the loss for its customers. This would slowly become the trend. Why should the customer pay for lax cyber security of a business enterprise? The risks of trading digital assets is being exposed. Bithumb conducted a security enhancement check up on June 16, 2018, stating, ”Recently, the number of unauthorised access attempts has increased. As such, an urgent server was conducted to strengthen the security of all system.” Anonymous sources say that malicious mails has been sent of Bithumb users earlier this month. Whether that has led to some spear phishing type attack, is not known.
The company is supposed to have been following the 5.5.7 regulation, which is becoming the standard. Under this requirement, at least 5% of the financial institutions staff should be IT specialists. Amongst those, 5% should be responsible for information security &at least 7% of the firm’s total budget should be on information security.
HACKERS SEEM TO ATTACK AT WILL.
Sanjay Sahay