In the span of a few years, cryptocurrencies have gone from laughingstock and novelty to a serious financial instrument, and a major sector in high-tech. The price of Bitcoin and Ethereum has gone from single dollars to thousands, and they're increasingly in the mainstream.
This is undoubtedly a positive development, as it opens new avenues for finance, transactions, tech developments, and more. Unfortunately, no innovation is without its dark side, and the crypto industry is no exception. A new webinar from XDR provider Cynet (you can see it here) dives deeper into this dark corner to explore the intersection of cybersecurity and cryptocurrency.
The first question is how, exactly, cryptocurrency creates security vulnerabilities for organizations. There's no single answer, and in many cases, the results are more indirect. This bears closer inspection, and the webinar, led by Cynet CyOps Analyst Ronen Ahdut, studies the different ways cryptocurrencies are used by attackers.
Into the mainstream, for better or worse
It's hard to argue that having greater access to financial tools is a bad thing, but the nature of cryptocurrency is ideal for threat actors to leverage against organizations and users. One of the most common ways this occurs is with ransomware.
In the past, ransomware attacks ran the risk of being easily detected – law enforcement can track the movement of fiat currencies through a banking network, and finding the data being stolen wasn't impossibly difficult. Cryptocurrencies – especially "privacy-focused" ones like Monero make it much harder to track and understand where funds are going, or who is behind them.
Similarly, cryptomining and cryptojacking tools have become incredibly popular tools deployed by malicious actors to leverage victims' resources and impact their organizations. These new threats require different approaches to confront, and a deeper understanding of how they work.
The webinar discusses:
- The basics of cryptocurrencies and the history behind the technology. To gain a deeper understanding of how and why cryptocurrencies have become popular among threat actors, it's important to comprehend where they come from, and how their basic structure lends itself to these activities.
- The intersection of cryptocurrency and cybersecurity. Cryptocurrencies don't exist in a vacuum, and as soon as they become potential threats, cybersecurity teams need to react and become aware of what the risks are. The intersection of these two fields is ripe for discovery.
- The techniques attackers use to infiltrate networks. Most crypto-based attacks aren't overt brute force incidents. Instead, they require subtlety and stealth. To this end, attackers look for increasingly inventive ways to infiltrate networks and deploy their payloads long before anyone can detect them.
- How organizations can defend themselves, and how Cynet can help. It's not enough to know that something is happening. To resolve the issue, organizations need the right mentality and the proper tools to defend themselves. The webinar will discuss techniques to detect, contain, mitigate, and defeat these attacks. It will also cover how Cynet can help organizations defend themselves.
You can watch the webinar now. Find the on-demand recording here.
