Security Risks in the Crypto Space
Prominent security failures by independent ICOs make the advantages of the Cryptonomos platform evident
After Bee Token’s exemplary community building program that saw their Telegram channel grow to 50,000 members and produce a fully subscribed whitelist, the sad story of their criminally hijacked token launch offers salient lessons for companies looking to control the chain of custody in their ICO. At last count, over a million dollars — almost a third of the total raise in the first 24 hours — had tragically been stolen by thieves who made a concerted, sophisticated, multi-angled attack on the Bee Token’s social, email, and fund raising platforms.
Repeated security failures are bringing ever greater regulatory scrutiny to crypto markets. In the past month Japanese Exchange Coincheck lost $530M worth of tokens to thieves. It’s fair to say that no company in this day and age can be totally immune to damage from malicious actors. Yet the simplistic collecting methods favoured by many self-developed ICOs like Bee Token — wherein a single wallet address is offered for deposit of ETH tokens — are ripe for criminal disruption. For Bee Token, a weak, one-dimensional chain of custody coupled with what appears to be a loss of control of their whitelist database and sophisticated, wide-scale attack over their main avenue of communication — Telegram — led to a rapidly unravelling nightmare for Bee Token that should have repercussions for the wider crypto community.
Cryptonomos offers a far more stable alternative to this structure of token collection by providing an isolated retail platform that creates barriers between token buyers and malicious actors. The attack on Bee Token was not simply a case of mismanagement as appears to have been the case with Coincheck, but was sophisticated sabotage that will give many ICO platforms and companies launching token sales pause for thought — we for one, are looking carefully at wide-scale attacks upon Telegram channels. However our token selling platform is largely immunized from manipulation of the type suffered by Bee Token — users on the Cryptonomos platform distribute crypto and we distribute tokens — wallet addresses are not publicly posted.
Crypto assets are a fledgling technology that is driving great change and disruption, yet which are also vulnerable to criminals in new ways. While legacy financial systems have had centuries to develop security protocols and systems, the crypto space is comparatively a brave new world. A secure, isolated, token buying platform like Cryptonomos lets token buyers and ICO companies feel reassured in their bravery.
