Attack

As the community was astounded by the bold hack of prominent Twitter accounts, it revealed the general vulnerability of centralised social media, where all information is kept at one place. It would not be possible to break a decentralized platform that easily.

Since the inception of bitcoin, cryptocurrency exchanges have been a major target of attack compared to other traditional financial institutions such as banks. As cryptocurrency platforms tighten cybersecurity, hackers find new cracks in the wall.

The US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets (OFAC) says it has sanctioned two Chinese nationals who laundered cryptocurrencies stolen by millions of North Korean hackers. Since the industry is still young, most cryptocurrency exchanges are under a major threat of losing their virtual currency holdings to wrong hands.

As of the recent political events between the long term sworn enemies of the United States and Iran, new measures have been reintroduced by the former. The United States under the Donald Trump administration imposed fresh economic sanctions on Iran. Following the sanctions aftermath prices of commodities like Bitcoin and Gold started to steadily enter a bull run.

The Travelex platform, active internationally for the exchange of currencies, has been hit by a heavy ransomware attack.

Today the cryptocurrency market has marked a turnaround and this could be because of ongoing US-Iran political turmoil. In fact, most cryptocurrencies have the positive (+) sign. Starting with Bitcoin, whose dominance not only resists, but is currently more than 69%, therefore growing. Investors are wondering if this is a "physiological" retracement or if the sector is benefiting from an effective recovery.

A couple of giant cryptocurrency exchanges globally faced it hot this year especially after experiencing repetitive attacks from unknown hackers. Due to these attacks, both the investors and exchanges lost billions and billions of their money. This year saw quite a few weighty hacking episodes, we have brought you some of the major breaches of 2019.

The allocated liquidator for Cryptopia, the collapsed New Zealand-based cryptocurrency exchange, has managed to recover around NZ$7.2 Mln (approx. $5 Mln) on balance since it was attacked by anonymous hackers for feasibly $18 Mln early this year. The exchange went into liquidation back in May after facing a gigantic attack by deadly unknown hackers in January.

When Cupertino launched its credit card two months ago, it immediately made it clear that it was "designed by Apple, not by the banks", as if to distance itself from a world that is by now obsolete.