How to secure your cryptocurrency

With growing market prices people are increasingly becoming targets of hackers. Prevent being hacked or have your digital assets taken. CoinDealer will never ask for passwords, codes or access to your computer.

With over 4 million bitcoins are gone forever the security of your digital assets is more important than ever. A top priority of the CoinDealer team is safety and account security.

CoinDealer invests significant time and resources to proactively detect and prevent attempts that could compromise your account.

Most times hacking occurs from exploiting humans through social engineering techniques. With a little charm, persistence and personal information a hacker can call your phone company, impersonate you and have the phone company enable visibility into your text messages via a web portal exposing your sms or forwarding your phone number to gain access to your secured accounts. This can all occur without ever touching your phone. This is real not a what if. These types of hacks happen everyday.

Other attacks can occur if computers are stolen, sensitive information such as public keys are discovered on chats/ or passwords and other sensitive information is shared in unsure channels.

Security Checklist

Review the CoinDealer security checklist which is a summary of the company security policy. Let us know if you notice anything unusual so we can take appropriate action.

• CoinDealer will never ask you for your password.
• Never give CoinDealer support staff (or anyone else for that matter) remote access to your computer.
• Watch for cloned websites that look identical to the CoinDealer’s website. The easiest way to tell is to look for the padlock icon in the address bar. It should say (CoinDealer LLC) and NOT (Security)
• Watch for grammatical errors in email or on websites. Scammers rarely take the time to proofread properly.
• Double check that the support channel you are using is legitimate prior to making transfers. (Examine the URL, SSL Certificate)
• Never give out your 2FA codes, this is not something CoinDealer staff would ever ask for, or expect you to provide.
• Watch out for services or websites promising unusually high returns or other unrealistic investment opportunities. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is
• Always keep your computer’s operating system up to date.
• Do regular scans using antivirus software. Scammers will often use malware to directly target individuals.

Email Safety

• Be careful when opening any attachments included in an email as they could be malicious.
• You should be careful of emails from people you know. Their email may have been compromised and could contain malicious content to manipulate you.
• Pay close attention to emails that appear to be from CoinDealer but are in fact slightly different in spelling. Example: support@coimdealer.io, support@coindealer.com, support@colndealer.io, etc. Notice the slight difference in the names, dot com rather than dot io, CoinDealer with a lowercase ‘ L ‘ in place of the ‘ i ‘. CoinDealer spelled with an ‘ M ‘
• Copy/paste links you receive in email rather than clicking on them. An attacker will have a hidden link or redirect even though it shows as ‘http://www.coindealer.io'
• Watch out for emails saying an individual has sent you money, when in fact the links in the message will open a payment window. If you aren’t careful it’s easy to send money from your account to these phishing scams.

Wallet Safety

• The only way someone could access your funds would be if they had access to your CoinDealer account, or in the case of a non-hosted wallet, your private key. We never transfer any private keys over the network, EVER. We never expose an endpoint to access private keys. CoinDealer is a hosted wallet service, which means we manage your private keys for you, securing your funds with a password, device confirmation and 2-factor authentication.
• Do not give others access to your device. If YOU give someone your access including your device (for 2FA) they could access your account and maliciously make transfers.
• CoinDealer will never ask for you wallet passwords or account passwords. Our security policy is to NOT provide a user any password manually, under no circumstance. We direct the user to the processes we’ve created for recovery.

Internally understanding and implementing security protocols and applying best practices is critical to prevent vulnerabilities. Attackers regularly target individual users who don’t have a full-time security team around to help with the response and aren’t prepared to resist an attack.

Thank you

Ryan Hickman

Ryan is founder of EpicAi and a technology advisor for CoinDealer.