White Hat Hackers Reveal New Scam Scheme: Insights at BlockShow Asia

BlockShow Asia 2019, an international blockchain event powered by Cointelegraph, is taking place at Singapore’s iconic Marina Bay Sands from Nov. 14 to 15. This year, the event is going to take the form of a Festival of Decentralized Technology. The guests will have the chance to take part in 10 conferences focusing on various aspects of the industry, including Privacy & Security, Development, Investments, Trading, Marketing & PR, Artificial Intelligence, Crypto Finance, Gaming & DApps, BAAS, as well as Regulations.

Stay secure online

Users often bump into malicious software while surfing the internet and downloading files. In the crypto industry, the prevalence of fraudulent activities can’t be underestimated. Black hat hackers do their utmost to pursue opportunities to steal the digital assets of unsuspecting cryptocurrency holders. In order to stand up to the most insidious attempts of scam artists to get an access to users’ personal data and money, a high level of security needs to be ensured.

According to recent stats, the United States government alone has budgeted about $17.5 billion for next year’s cybersecurity needs, which is almost $1 billion more than funds spent in 2019.

One of the conferences at BlockShow Asia 2019 is devoted to privacy and security. At the conference, a wide range of cybersecurity issues currently affecting the blockchain industry will be discussed, and comprehensive solutions to them will be introduced. One of the experts is Dmitriy Budorin, co-founder and CEO of Hacken, a company offering “cutting-edge cybersecurity services” to businesses. The list of its clients include AirAsia, Proximax and VeChain.

In its recently published blog, the company tells a story about one huge hacking attack and how its team managed not only to save thousands of cryptocurrency holders from losing their digital assets but also to teach the scam artists a lesson. 

Investigation case

After being asked to analyze a new cryptocurrency startup, a member of the Hackenproof community, upon opening the website link, spotted a suspicious sort of Chrome plugin. It turned out that this plugin was being actively used by the scam artists to steal user data located in the cookies. 

After searching patiently for vulnerabilities on the website, he hit on a good idea. It might be that the scammers were stealing the users’ IP address and logging them in a database without checking for SQL injections — in other words, one of the web’s security vulnerabilities. Then, he initiated an SQL injection and got an access to the databases, containing the addresses of both users and black hat hackers, as well as transactions between them.

The total number of breached login credentials was around 5,000. As it turned out, the website with a malicious plugin had operated efficiently, with hacks taking place every day and 656 scammers already registered there. The results of the investigation have shown that there were four different links sent to individual Binance, Local Bitcoin, Coinbase and Blockchain.com users with the intent to steal their crypto assets.

The story described above is only the one of thousands of hacking attacks happening all the time in the crypto space. That’s why it is essential to take action against black hat hackers and ensure a sufficient level of protection, the BlockShow team notes.

Presenting experts in crypto security

More details about this particular situation, as well as other numerous hacking attacks common in the cryptocurrency space and how to fight against them, will be revealed during BlockShow Privacy & Security Conference at BlockShow Asia 2019. Dmitriy Budorin will also join the BlockShow stage to explain how blockchain companies, startups and cryptocurrency holders can avoid potential risks of fraud and ensure a higher level of security.

The list of Privacy & Security experts whom guests will personally meet at the conference features Michael Gu, founder and host of Boxmining; David Chaum, cryptography pioneer and founder of Elixxir; Yeo Siang Tiong, general manager at Kaspersky Lab SEA; Daryl Hok, executive vice president and chief operating officer at CertiK; and Liz Steininger, CEO and managing director of Least Authority.