In the past few weeks, lot of things have happened to remind us that no system is perfect. The traditional banks are full of flaws, centralised exchange is not different from traditional banks and now even the hardware wallets we trust for self custody is not longer reliable.
Earlier this month, Zenith bank confirmed that hackers gained unauthorised access to their customers data. Although money is saved but their email, phone numbers and other sensitive information were exposed. Who knows what they're going to do with this stolen details? Sell them or use it to scam potential victims? It's time to rethink before handing out our personal data to any third parties.
Last months, about 3 popular exchanges announce they'll be shutting down their operations. They told their customers to withdraw their coins to somewhere else before the deadline. Some users are complaining about high withdrawal fees but they don't have choice than to deal with it. When next you hear not your keys, not your coins, you'll stay away from keeping your assets in centralized exchanges.
And latest is the ColdCard incident. This wasn't phishing. Nobody clicked a link or fell for a scam. It was a manufacturing flaw in a device sold specifically as the safe option, the one people bought because they didn't trust exchanges. Imagine paying money to lose your coin.
Don't keep large assets on any centralized exchanges. Deposit whenever you want to use it either for trading or P2P.
Generate your seed properly on hardware wallets. Don't rely on automatic generation.
Use multi sig setup if you hold a significant amount and planned to hold for a long time.
Store your keys separately and away from online. No system is completely safe and free from risk but with proper management, you can reduce the risk significantly.
Please stay safe!!!
Wow! Is it what really happened to zenith Bank for the past days when i went to do transfer and my phone app was not opening and when i asked questions around people that was using the same zenith Bank, they were complaining the same thing, although the money in that account was not much and i was not even aware that hackers gained access to the Bank, we need to be extremely careful on the kind money we keep in the Bank or centralized exchange and it is not always good to give data to a third party, that is why Bank always advice never share your pin or the code at Bank of your ATM card with any else.
And incident that occurred few days back thought me never to have one Bank as saving bank, that one Bank can be disappointing if there is need for emergency withdrawal of fund, so i learnt that we should have more than one Bank incase there is bridge in network or hackers.
