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If you bought crypto or invested in crypto assets, recent media headlines must have scared you off.
In the month of January alone, there are a number of crypto signature hacks, one of the most striking being the theft of digital currencies worth more than $35 million from Crypto.coma platform where you can buy and sell bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies.
And what you need to focus on is keeping your crypto secure.
“So this is a different paradigm from the way we look at money today,” said Chris Kline, chief operating officer and co-founder of the cryptocurrency investment firm. bitcoin wrath. “Either we have it attached to gold and we put it in a safe deposit box or we have it in a bank, which is FDIC insured and there’s this whole institution in the middle between you and your money.”
Crypto, Kline added, is “a paradigm shift to a more decentralized money system. And that means you can keep your crypto in wallets and things, but you don’t want to leave it in risky places.”
The data is public
Past hacks have occurred almost at the exchange level. If you leave your coins there, making it easy to buy and sell them, then that’s when a hack is compromised on that exchange. So, you could be engaged.
The most exposed thing is your wallet address because that wallet address is known to everyone and anyone can look at it. And your wallet is essentially your key to get into the blockchain. Anyone can see any of the transactions associated with that wallet. In fact, you can go into the transaction and see exactly what was sent, where it was sent with just a few clicks.
“Most cryptocurrency users need to realize that their data is public,” said Nick Donarski, cybersecurity expert and founder of ORE Sys LLC. “So it’s both a benefit and a security risk.”
“If you’re not careful about what data or information you actually put on the blockchain, then you know the information is public to everyone who has access,” Donarski warned. “So good education, good understanding, good user practices that you would normally have with your banking system, you know, strong passwords. Don’t share your private key.”
The security expert urges users to know what real data lives on the blockchain and what doesn’t.
Putting your coins in what is called a cold storage wallet is the best recommendation. It is a digital wallet that is not connected to the Internet. So if you are not trading much and just accumulating bitcoins, you want to keep it safe, this might be a suitable solution.
There are the newcomers to cold storage, which means there are multiple steps of control and the keys are stored offline. That way, if something happens to Coinbase, for example, or Crypto.com, your coins are off-site somewhere else.
“The way I’ve always explained it is your checking account and your savings account. So most people have at least one or both, right? If you have a checking account, you have a debit card linked to it and that debit card will be lost if someone hits it or steals it or whatever. They can steal it and use it to buy things. You don’t want that attached to your biggest savings,” Kline said.
Do your due diligence
“So if you have $20,000 in savings, you don’t want a card linked to it. So most savings accounts don’t have a card linked and just sit isolated. And it’s an adjacent account like a savings account.” Same concept with crypto, the crypto you want to trade otherwise that’s where you use those centralized exchanges, or put it in longer-term storage. Now you can get it out quickly. It’s not like something is stuck in there.” Kline added.
It is also necessary to take some precautions before investing or buying tokens. Experts recommend doing your due diligence and not buying just out of fear of missing out (FOMO), for example.
You need to make sure you take your time to really see what the token is, see what the actual project is. Make sure the project really has a goal and make sure they really have plans. There are nearly 13,000 coins listed, according to data firm CoinGecko. And coins are created almost every day.
Among these tokens, there are many that are memes or rug pools. To avoid them, read their project, try to see if they have a website, if there are any social media posts (Twitter, Reddit) and see what they reveal about the founders or creators. And above all, ask yourself what is the use of the digital currency that someone is trying to sell to you or that you are trying to buy.
“Being in crypto means being in the world of hackers. There is money. If I can get in there, I can get somebody’s bitcoin,” Kline warned. Bitcoin Ira, his signature, is “constantly under attack because people think if they can take us down, they can come in and get access to the crypto and move it to their wallet.”
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