Cyber Criminals Most Active at Hacking Crypto Accounts During Holidays

[Ozark]

A cybersecurity firm has warned cryptocurrency investors to take extra vigilance this holiday as criminals are most active during this season.

While everybody is having a food time, being merry and jolly, so are cybercriminals.

This was the warning by Silent Sector Cybersecurity Solutions, a Phoenix, Arizona,-based cybersecurity firm, as it reminded the public as well as cryptocurrency investors to stay vigilant this Yuletide season as criminals do not take a holiday, but instead, take advantage of the merrymaking to strike.

"We've seen a significant increase in breaches. Cybercriminals are compromising email accounts through the major cloud-based services people are used to using, then gaining administrative privileges to other accounts that the email was used to set up,” said Silent Sector founder Zach Fuller.

He noted that cybercriminals are very actively taking over cryptocurrency accounts during the holiday season. Fuller continued criminals plan their attacks by "changing the login, so the owner loses access, then moving the funds to a different account. Due to the confidential design of cryptocurrencies, there is no effective recourse for the original account holder and little chance that they'll ever see their funds again.”

According to Fuller, criminals gain administrative access to a company’s domain name after they access the emails and cell phone numbers of employees in order to bypass two-factor authentication. Hackers can also demand a ransom or move to another registrar once they get full access to a company’s domain names.

This is very dangerous for any company because the attackers could either take down the website or replace it with obscene messages that could be very damaging to the business’s credibility.

With access to email accounts, hackers can have full information about the firm’s calendar, which gives them sufficient knowledge of when to strike. Fuller said criminals are known to hijack cryptocurrency accounts when the owners are away from their computers, at their Christmas party or just on holiday.

Fuller is recommending at least 12 or more characters when creating passwords and not to use common words. It is also recommended to use an authentication app, such as Google Authenticator, so hackers would require your specific instance of the app access of your account should they decide to attack.

A study by Moscow-based information security firm Group-IB showed that cyber attacks against digital currency exchanges rose by 369% in 2017, which highlights the weaker information security coinciding with the surge in cryptocurrency markets.

SOURCE