When buying digital assets, an investor is faced with the problem of their storage. For the safety of the cryptocurrency, it is necessary to...
When buying digital assets, an investor is faced with the problem of their storage. For the safety of the cryptocurrency, it is necessary to adhere to some rules, writes RBC Crypto.
Key safety aspects
For registration on crypto exchanges and other cryptocurrency services, a general email account, which is used daily for personal purposes, will not work. It is better to register a separate mail and use it only for digital coin transactions. The same should be done with the phone number.
In 2019, New York teenager Yousef Selassie stole data from 75 people and over $ 1 ml in digital money. He cloned the victims' phone numbers in order to gain access to their email accounts and accounts on marketplaces.
When working with crypto assets, it is worth enabling protected mode in the browser, which stops writing cookies, cache, and other system information containing user data.
There are cases when attackers changed the addresses of cryptocurrency platforms in search results, which led to the theft of user data. To avoid this, you need to save the address of the crypto exchange or enter it into the browser line yourself.
Diversification in business
It is worth distributing assets not only when investing, but also when storing cryptocurrency. For example, it is better not to store large amounts on crypto exchanges, since there is always a risk of being hacked. Digital coins on the cryptocurrency exchange do not actually belong to their owner, since they are located on the site's wallet, which can suffer from the actions of intruders.
For 8 years, hackers have stolen more than $ 13.6 billion in cryptocurrency, having made over 330 hacks of exchanges, wallets for storing digital assets, and decentralized applications. Most of the stolen funds fell on exchanges and online wallets - about $ 12 billion.
When buying digital coins for the long term, it is best to keep them in a cold, or hardware, wallet. It is recommended to store the number of funds required for trading on a crypto exchange. If the amount of investment in a cryptocurrency is impressive, then it should be distributed among several cold wallets. Then, if one of them is hacked, the funds on the other will not suffer.
Personal data above all
When working with a cold wallet that is installed on a PC or mobile device, you should also secure your funds by saving your seed phrase in a secure place (a set of random 12, 18, or 24 words to restore access to the wallet). Typically, the seed phrase is printed on paper and stored along with important documents.
Last year, British entrepreneur Alistair Milne ran an experiment to find out how long it would take for hackers to break into his wallet. To do this, he published 8 words from his seed phrase from the wallet that stored 1 bitcoin. After 44 hours, the hacker managed to gain access to the storage and take possession of the cryptocurrency. The hacker learned the remaining 4 words by the method of selection.
