The Impact of Cryptocurrency Attacks on Cryptocurrency Exchange

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that have recently emerged to popularity are backed by the security of its founding technology — Blockchain. However, cybercriminals are having a picnic when it comes to earning lots of money hacking cryptocurrencies’ weakest link in the chain, the cryptocurrency exchanges. These are business establishments, web services that offer to exchange real world currency to the customer’s choice of cryptocurrency of relatively equal value at the time of the exchange.

These ‘money changers’ are not organized the same, some have been founded with the use of insecure system policies, handling of their hot and cold crypto wallets and other weakness a typical company has like networking vulnerabilities and unpatched operating systems being deployed for their workstation/servers. For a period too short to consider as ‘coincidence’, Coingeek.com has been a victim of a recent DDoS attack, the same happened with BitcoinSV.io shortly afterward.

Coingeek.com has posted in their site their own version of investigation about the ‘coincidence’. “The timing of these attacks could be coincidental, but the timing of the attacks is somewhat suspect. We won’t cast aspersions towards any of the bastions of free speech in the bitcoin community, but it does highlight a problem with society in recent years. I was always led to believe that you let your opponent talk and you listen. You present your well-reasoned arguments and allow the better ideas to succeed for the betterment of the society. With their most recent changes, 5th since the upgrade, ABC’s critics continue to grow. People are critical on social media, and now the mainstream tech press is starting to join the chorus of critics admonishing the Bitmain and Bitcoin.com funded group of developers,“ explained Bill Beatty, Coingeek.com’s Editor-In-Chief.

The vulnerability of the platforms used by these cryptocurrency exchanges is not transparent to the traders. They operate black boxes as their systems, with the end-users not knowing what is going on in the background, they just have to have faith that the system will work as intended, free from any possibility of vulnerability attack.

These cryptocurrency exchanges operate on a business of ‘You have to trust us with your Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) because we said so.’ The paranoid will surely keep the contents of her cryptocurrency wallet privately, without using a cryptocurrency exchange with a history questionable service quality. This further shrinks the cryptocurrency exchange market to the next unrecoverable level. The fewer players in the market, the more influential each and every surviving cryptocurrency exchanges are.

When issues like hacking reach the traditional western media, it goes to an unexpected twisted version of itself in prime time news. Traditional western media love sensationalized and politicized stories, even if those aren’t originally written to do so. How many times have we encountered them naming China, North Korea or Pakistan states as the possible culprit of a hacking incident? Too many times to count, but usually, the question is still in the air due to the lack of evidence. This is how screwed the current situation is, the victim losing money while she gets the slot in a TV interview of western traditional media.