when do cyber criminals hit & impact in crypto-currency

(The Hacker Logo)

My first real professional responsibility was to distribute a censored / filtered internet to students in the university where I was studying. This along with the involvement in communities have made me very paranoid and interested in network security. This has helped in my career as well.

Little more context

Something I remember is the PHPbb forum vulnerabilities and the attacks happened around Christmas in 2004/2003. I am not able to recollect the CVE & date but it looks like CVE-2004-1315 was the culprit.

The company I was working for had tens and thousands of servers under their management and they found massive number of them under attack on the eve of Christmas.

why talking about this now ?

I don't want to create conspiracy theories, but just wanted to tell everyone to secure the servers, secure the wallets etc. Upgrade software with the latest security fixes, make sure that the wallets have multi factor authentication based on at-least SMS OTP activated. Christmas season and holidays is celebrated all over the world and many a times the technicians / engineers taking care of the infrastructure will be junior folks. This is a window of opportunities for intruders. This time, we have a super long holiday weekend with 3 days of continuous leave.

One lesson I have learned is to be available on long holidays to take care of any security issues if needed & like every other major international festival, I will be on guard of whatever little digital assets which we hold dear.

when do cyber criminals hit & impact in crypto-currency ?

The real answer to this question, when some become less vigilant. But right now even non-technical people can suffer with something like wanna-cry or an hijack on an exchange.

PS: never confuse the term hacker & the word is not used in this post on purpose as hacker is a word which is often interchangeably used to denote an attacker/intruder/cracker/script-kiddie.

hacker: n.

> A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.

Be a hacker & Stay safe !