Study: hackers stole about 14% of the stocks of Bitcoin and Ethereum

In less than a decade, hackers stole $ 1.2 billion in bitcoins and Ethereum, said Autonomous Research's director of financial strategy, Lex Sokolin. Given the rapid growth of digital assets in 2017, today this amount would have been much larger, Bloomberg writes.

"Apparently, theft of the crypto currency has turned into an industry with a profit of about $ 200 million a year. Hackers have compromised more than 14% of all stocks of bitcoin and Ethereum, "Sokolin said.

In addition, the theft of the Crypto-currency was a loss for companies and governments of about $ 11.3 billion - potentially it could be taxes and commissions from legal transactions, said WinterGreen Research CEO Susan Eustis.

In the danger can be themselves blockades. Thus, a researcher from Cisco Talos discovered vulnerabilities in Ethereum clients, which can lead to "leakage of confidential information about existing accounts". In the past, the "loophole" in Parity has already caused the freezing of about $ 150 million in Ethereum tokens.

However, later the company Parity Technologies stated that the vulnerabilities mentioned in the report of Cisco experts were corrected in new versions of the software Ethereum-client.

Also in December, the South Korean crypto exchange Youbit announced the closure and commencement of bankruptcy proceedings after being the victim of hackers for the second time in a year. Unknown attackers then abducted about 17% of the assets of the site. In the same month, the mining service NiceHash said that hackers stole $ 60 million from the purse of the company.

Vulnerabilities are also subject to smart contracts. June 17, 2016, one of the most large-scale attacks in the crypto industry took place - due to a mistake in the code, the promising and very popular project The DAO lost more than $ 60 million.

Co-founder of Quantstamp Richard Ma believes that in part the fault is the old-fashioned thinking of programmers.

"If there is a bug, the coders release a patch for it. However, with smart contracts everything is different: if you run them into the network, then it is already impossible to change them, "said Ma.

However, according to him, this opens up new opportunities for companies specializing in cyber security. For example, in March, Quantstamp will release an automated tool for checking smart contracts for errors. In addition, established and well-known companies in this industry, including McAfee Inc., can also be redesigned to protect innovative systems.

"In many cases, our existing products can help to protect [the blockage-] ecosystem. In general, it is also vulnerable to attacks, like other software, "added McAfee technical director Steve Grobman.

At the same time, what is important, the new sphere of activity can become very profitable. According to WinterGreen, the market for software, services and hardware solutions for the protection of blockhouses could grow to $ 355 billion. In comparison, in 2017 it was "only" $ 259 million.