

With cryptocurrency, on the other hand, the targets are quite obvious and extracting value is simply a matter of moving the digital funds anonymously and it is virtually impossible to trace cybercriminals who are even slightly clever. Or if someone steals your bank password, they still might have to defeat 2FA and figure out how to drain funds without being traced. Victims of a cryptolocker attack, for example, can just walk away and lose their data or restore it from a backup and not pay the ransom demands. Often times, even successful hacks yield no value to the attacker. They might have to extort the victim or find a buyer for the information they steal, for example.

This presents an entirely different and difficult set of obstacles for attackers even after they succeed in compromising a system. With a traditional target, once an attacker gains access to a system, they must both exfiltrate the thing of value (which in itself may not be obvious or easy to find) and somehow convert that into money in their pockets - and do that all without being traced. This is very different from traditional targets of cyber attacks. The other important aspect of crypto targets is that, once compromised, it's incredibly easy for attackers to extract value. In the following sections, I'll explain why crypto is fundamentally different and how that influences the kinds of attackers. I don't think that concept needs any elaboration. With crypto, the ultimate targets (wallets, network nodes, etc) have obvious value. Usually, that's to extract some kind of financial gain from their victims. Who are the attackers and why they are after cryptoĪt the end of the day, attackers usually have some motivation for carrying out an attack. But here I want to take a moment to tell you why the threat is quite different when it comes to your crypto and also provide information about an important aspect of assessing the risk of software you may use. They're after just about anything they can get their hands on, anything from your name and email to accessing your bank account. As most of us are already aware, cybercriminals are a thing.
