Not only investors, but also cyber criminals appear to be swarming to cryptocurrency exchanges, which have experienced a two-fold increase in the number of attacks in recent months as crypto currencies have touched all-time highs multiple times.
According to sources, all big exchanges have experienced at least two to three large attacks in the previous month, and many investors have lost their crypto holdings when their wallets were hacked into. Criminals are impersonating or spoofing social media identities in order to deceive consumers into giving them access to their cryptocurrency wallets.
One of the country's oldest and largest cryptocurrency exchanges Zebpay and other prominent exchanges have discovered that the most serious security threat they face daily is sophisticated criminal frauds that combine social engineering with computer intrusion.
Exchanges have scaled up their cyber protocols and systems to counter the most common attack methods, but vulnerabilities remain, and hackers find new ways to target exchanges and investors.
"Presently, many crypto operating exchanges are vulnerable to cyber-attacks as, in most cases, the crypto assets sit in wallets that do not have a robust security and password mechanism. It is only a matter of time, before we witness large-scale, targeted cyber-attacks on exchanges and various platforms, and it will become crucial not just to keep a security framework in place, but even to ascertain liability in such cases, "said Siddharth Keskar, CEO of MZM Analytics, a legal-forensic firm.
