As Bitcoin Price Surges, Phishing Attacks on Cryptocurrency Wallets Intensify

As Bitcoin Price Surges,
Phishing Attacks on Cryptocurrency Wallets Intensify

Today's Bitcoin to US Dollar exchange rate has reached $902, the first time Bitcoin price has gone above the $900 mark since January 2014, almost three years ago. Nobody knows what's driving this sudden surge of Bitcoin popularity, but cyber-criminals won't bother looking into macroeconomic factors when deciding that the market is ripe and ready for the taking again.

Bitcoin price surge reverberates through cybercriminal landscape

Over the past couple of months, as the Bitcoin price was slowly coming out of the $200-$400 price range where it spent almost two years, cyber-criminals took notice.

The first to do so were ransomware authors, who had to cut down the ransom demands they asked from victims. They had to do this because a ransom of 2 Bitcoin that once meant $400, all of sudden became $1,200, or more, a sum that very few users could afford to pay.

But ransomware victims are occasional Bitcoin users. A more lucrative operation is the phishing market sector, where crooks have yet again turned their full attention to Bitcoin wallet services.

The culprits behind these phishing pages targeting Bitcoin users are your regular career phishers. The Cisco OpenDNS team has tracked the operators of some of these Bitcoin phishing sites to numerous other phishing domains, used for collecting credentials for other services, such as Google, Dropbox, Apple, Amazon, and others.

What Any Cryptocurrency Needs to Achieve Mass Adoption

    5 Things Any Cryptocurrency Needs to Achieve Mass Adoption

Bitcoin, the giant in the world of cryptocurrency, continues to defy all expectations of an early demise and rises higher and higher in value and use. Its adoption as everyday money, however, remains negligent among the common people, almost eight years after the digital currency first emerged.

While the title of “ the first cryptocurrency” is no longer up for grabs, the title of “digital cash” still remains unclaimed, ready to be seized by another up-and-coming digital money. In order to become the common medium of exchange for large swaths of the world, a cryptocurrency first needs to fulfill a few crucial requirements.

Easy and inexpensive transactions

Forget about cryptocurrency for a second. Right now, regular people use either cash or card for day-to-day transactions.

Cash has no transaction costs but requires you to be physically present and have adequate change, and card transactions are relatively instant, though final confirmations often happen the next day, although fees are relatively high it is enough to disincentivize very small transactions. Any cryptocurrency wanting to make inroads with the common people has to beat this by having faster and cheaper transactions.

Bitcoin already offers this advantage, though the margin by which it does is growing slimmer by the day, and even now it may not be enough to entice the public to abandon traditional financial means. Any cash or card replacement has to be better by a large enough margin to warrant a change.

The same goes for fees. Cash has no fees. Other money transfer tools, like cards and bank accounts, are able to charge a fee because they are able to function across great distances with greater efficiency. Cryptocurrency has those same advantages over cash, and as such can be expected to have an associated transaction fee. However, that fee must be significantly lower in order to entice your average consumer away from banking systems. Large companies can afford to make major payment changes in order to save a few cents per transaction because of scale, but regular people cannot.

Improvements to Bitcoin’s basic model

Bitcoin retains an enormous lead in adoption ahead of other cryptocurrencies. Compared to traditional financial systems, Bitcoin provides enough benefits and improvements to warrant a switch. If a currency wants to beat Bitcoin as the new money, it has to be objectively better. Faster or more inexpensive transactions, more anonymity, a better governance structure, and other features are needed to set another coin apart to justify its use and adoption. If a cryptocurrency does similar things as Bitcoin in the exact same way, its chances of taking over as the digital money of the future will be extremely slim.

A streamlined Bitcoin substitution mechanism

Right now, Bitcoin maintains a massive lead in adoption over every other cryptocurrency. That lead was earned on the promise and hype, not of Bitcoin alone, but of cryptocurrency and of the Blockchain technology itself.

Attempting to best the great front-runner of digital currency from scratch, and without a truly staggering level of difference between the two, simply won’t happen. The only way to compete with Bitcoin, as previously mentioned, is to provide at least as much utility, and a large chunk of Bitcoin’s utility is its adoption lead. What another cryptocurrency needs, then, is an easy and efficient way to be used in Bitcoin’s place such as an automatic exchange built into the wallet.

An easy fiat currency conversion system

Like it or not, the world still currently runs on government-issued fiat currency. Living entirely off of cryptocurrency, without any method of conversion into fiat, it is extremely difficult at the present time, and not a viable option for most people. The average person will need an easy way to buy and offload a cryptocurrency for it to be a practical option for them. Most cryptocurrencies are only easily accessible through first acquiring Bitcoin. In order to become dominant and widely accessible, that crippling reliance on Bitcoin needs to end.

An aggressive adoption campaign targeted at the common people

Finally, in order to entice the world at large, the digital currency needs to presented in a way that resonates with most people. While some technical users will care about hash rates, cryptographic keys, smart contracts, and ring signatures, the common folk will not. They need to be reached with the language of cheaper fees, faster access to funds, more security, less paperwork, etc. The only way anyone will know why cryptocurrency makes sense for them is for someone to tell them why. In order to achieve that, a successful marketing campaign is needed.

The cryptocurrency world, while new, is wildly diverse. However, in terms of a tool for everyday use in financial transactions, Bitcoin has almost exclusive reign. In order to dethrone the king of digital cash, any competitor has to bring their A-game.

David Ogden
Contributor

 

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

Cryptocurrency Wallets

CryptoCurrency Wallets

I am continuing my education regarding MyCryptoWorld.

Today I am looking at wallets. Previously I have learn't that Cryptocurrency transactions are protected by military level encryption and physical coins do not exist. So where is the best place to store our Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies.

There are three types of wallets

  • User controlled wallets
  • Hosted wallets
  • Hardware wallets

Your options. probably  depends on your age and familiarity with using computers and mobile devices and how often or how many coins you have, the choice is very much up to you.

My first choice is a user controlled wallet such as Blockchain, which is web based and also can be used on mobile devices. You have full control over your money, but that comes with its own dangers: you could lose your private keys, your computer could be hacked and the keys could be stolen, or your computer could break, and if you did not keep another record of your keys, you’d be out of luck.

One reason I like Blockchain is because the wallet is built on an HD (or hierarchical deterministic) framework, which has a different method for address generation and management. Each public address your wallet generates stems from your wallet's xPub (or Extended Public Key). Once your public address receives an incoming payment, a new address will automatically be generated and display when you click on receive.

There is a danger If you use the same address every time you receive funds, it becomes easy for anyone to track your entire payment history. This method of address generation improves privacy by automatically presenting you with a new address when you’re expecting payment.

I have also looked at Circle which is a hosted wallet which is more mobile based and very user friendly wallet,which can hold currencies or Bitcoin and you can send and receive either to other people by using email or Bitcoin addresses. However, there are limits which are placed on you initial transactions (0.3329 BTC weekly limit) No need to worry about anything except the limits, Great for day to day use. No need to use Bitcoin exchanges as this is all built in, Conversions are made when you add or remove funds from your wallet. Bitcoin balances in your Circle account, are fully insured against any breach of digital or physical data storage at Circle.

Initially I thought that its security was not up to scratch as I was not required to supply ID information to purchase Bitcoin. When I wanted to send Bitcoin however, I had to supply additional information which delayed the ability to send for 3-5 working days.
 

Hardware wallet is a special type of Bitcoin wallet which stores the user's private keys in a secure hardware device, which might be a usb or other storage device such as a mini computer

They have major advantages over standard software wallets:

  • private keys are often stored in a protected area of a microcontroller, and cannot be transferred out of the device in plain text

  • immune to computer viruses that steal from software wallets

  • can be used securely and interactively, as opposed to a paper wallet which must be imported to software at some point

  • much of the time, the software is open source, allowing a user to validate the entire operation of the device

 

If you want further security you could consider using a Brain Wallet

You might ask why I am providing this information and researching Cryptocurrency, It is because I am involved with the ICO of a new Cryptocoin.

David Ogden
MyCryptoWorld

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden