Crypto Academy Week 5: All About Blockchain Security – by @gbenga

Source

Hi everyone, welcome to this week’s awesome lesson. In this homework post, I will be solving this week’s task that involves writing about security problems in cryptocurrency and also giving my opinion and knowledge about blockchain security and some of the security problems in cryptocurrency. I have to say, this week 5 topic by the Steemit crypto professor @gbenga was a very important topic as far as blockchain is concerned – we all know the importance of security when it comes to cryptocurrency assets cannot be overemphasized, so this was a very important topic to write about. Based on the main task for this post, I will be discussing some of the security problems associated with cryptocurrency at the moment.

Unrecoverability of lost keys
This is also a major problem when it comes to the security of cryptocurrencies because as far as cryptocurrency is concerned, it is not possible to recover lost keys and in the process, the cryptocurrency is lost. And that is why it is a big concern for many. Unlike other traditional financial systems, when if you lose your passwords, you can request to reset your passwords but in cryptocurrency, lost keys cannot be recovered and when keys are lost, the funds are lost as well and can’t be recovered. This is a big concern in the cryptocurrency world and for many - one of the big drawbacks that slows down the widespread adoption of cryptocurrency.

Phishing Attacks and Dust Attacks
Phishing attacks have grown into becoming one of the problems affecting users in cryptocurrency. Scammer create a fake replica of top web wallets or site relating to cryptocurrency so as to deceive people to input their details into the fake sites. When this is done, people who input their valuable details like passwords, keys etc into any of these phishing sites lose their crypto assets because that is one of the main aims of phishing attacks in the cryptocurrency space, to steal cryptocurrency assets away from people.

This recent report on the cointelegraph blog writes about a known phishing attack aimed at metamask users https://cointelegraph.com/news/ciphertrace-warns-of-surge-in-funds-lost-to-metamask-phishers

Dust Attacks s is another security problem that is associated with cryptocurrency. Dust using bitcoin as for instance is simply a very tiny amount of bitcoin considered as too small for a send transaction since the fees would be much larger than the small amount considered as dust. In cryptocurrency, a dust attack is simply a malicious activity by scammers or hackers where a tiny amount of cryptocurrency considered as dust is set to users wallets with the aim to breach the privacy of cryptocurrency users.

This article https://www.coindesk.com/dust-attacks-bitcoin-wallets writes about dust attacks in more details…

My Opinion

As a user of discord, received quite a number of scam DMs from unknown/scam accounts on discord... These scammers send out lots of scam links/phishing links to users to trick people into clicking on their fake and scam links. This has become an issue as these scammers/phishing scammers continue sending out loads of DMs to different users on different social media sites to try to capture the gullible ones into falling for their scam and phishing tricks.

Some of the ways to avoid these security problems is to ensure that your keys are safe and are kept in a secure place. In other not to fall for phishing attacks, Never visit any link you receive from strangers, you must always carefully confirm the url you are visiting to ensure that you are on the correct url.

Cc:
@steemcurator01
@steemcurator02