Hacks are everywhere and Where should we store our money?

[Jubilee58]

There are different ways that our account can be hacked, sometimes they target entire cryptocurrency exchanges, and sometimes they can also target individual wallet, and strike. When an exchange is targeted, and the scammers happen to succeed, it is probably the cause of the exchange because they are the custodian of your Bitcoin asset, and on the other part when a private wallet is attacked, this could be linked to the fault of the wallet owner. A wallet can be hacked when the owner is unable to keep his investment information safe and secured.
In a non custodial wallet, your investment is safe, except on the ground of security comprise which is from the owner otherwise where only you is holding your wallet details no other person can actually gain access to it.

[Opiate32]

A lot of things come from small things we overlook because we are in a rush or too comfortable. We click links and approve request without always thinking twice. There is no saving method that can remove every risk. The only thing that matter is by being careful with the decisions we make before anything goes wrong. We shouldn’t be security conscious only after we get hacked, it is supposed to be a part of how we handle things, most especially our money everyday.

[fruktik]

I have an opinion that Binance is the most secured exchange and no hacker can steal its assets because of their security measures. But the recent successful hack on Binance has forced me to change my opinion about CEX. Now if hackers can go after Binance then they can do that in future too with other state of the art exchanges also.

As a crypto user, we need to learn from these incidents that exchanges are vulnerable and best way to store our crypto is to use wallets that gives us full control of the keys.

Who told you that exchanges couldn’t be hacked? Anything created by humans can be broken into. And I’ve seen proof of that once again. This didn’t come as a surprise to me. On the contrary, I was expecting this to happen. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.

Even after all this, measures will be taken to strengthen security, but that still offers no guarantees.

Is there any way to avoid losing funds? Yes: diversify your capital. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

[viljy]

The growing series of hacks may lead to a preference for custodial services among cryptocurrency users. This may seem strange, but the explanation is simple: if the custodian guarantees compensation for losses, people may prefer a custodial service over losing cryptocurrency from their non‑custodial wallet (the loss from a hack of which no one will compensate).

However, this has its drawbacks: the transparency of assets, the unrestricted freezing, or even confiscation on some suddenly emerging grounds (not necessarily legitimate). So, it’s an exchange of one risk for another.

[Supreme Donvic]

I have not heard any news about a bank being hacked for a very long time now, let me say in my country Nigeria I have not had any news of a successful hack in any of the banks, so you can store your money in banks if you wish to because I believe it is actually safe over there, we sound as if crypto wallet and exchange are the place we can only store our money people have been using Banks to store their money so I see nothing wrong with it, if you are afraid of using crypto wallet or exchange then use the bank.

[oll]

I once read a post on X that was quite interesting a few weeks ago, but I forgot not to save the post, so I can't give the reference as a thread that was created, but I remember what it said, with a sentence like this;

Perps was hacked
DeFi was hacked
CEX was hacked
DEX was hacked
Prediction Market was hacked
Hot Wallet was hacked
Cold Wallet was hacked
Hardware Wallet was hacked

There is no safe place to store money, so where should we store it?

There's still a safe place to store Bitcoin. The fact is, even though cold wallets can be hacked and suffer data leaks, they remain the most reliable place to store crypto. Every security flaw discovered is immediately closed, and then the service, whether an exchange or a cold wallet, becomes safer. In general, I think that even if all the security issues the AI is searching for hadn't been discovered now, they would have been discovered later.
So, while hacks have just appeared now, that doesn't mean they wouldn't have appeared later, or, more accurately, would have been discovered. But I believe that this strengthens the overall security of services because they monitor each other.

[Texac]

I have not heard any news about a bank being hacked for a very long time now, let me say in my country Nigeria I have not had any news of a successful hack in any of the banks, so you can store your money in banks if you wish to because I believe it is actually safe over there, we sound as if crypto wallet and exchange are the place we can only store our money people have been using Banks to store their money so I see nothing wrong with it, if you are afraid of using crypto wallet or exchange then use the bank.

Banks can still get hacked, but they are generally way safer than CEXs.  That's because bank deposits are mainly recorded as balances in the bank's system, making them much harder to steal and transfer without authorization.   Hacker can't just get hold of a private key and drain the whole account like they can with crypto. On top of that, deposits sit under proper regulation and are backed by stuff like deposit insurance.

However,  the flip side is that if money just sit in a bank, it just does not really grow,  inflation keep taking away the value of it .  That's also a reason why many people seek to go for Bitcoin and other investments to safeguard and grow their wealth .

[CryptoBuds]

I have an opinion that Binance is the most secured exchange and no hacker can steal its assets because of their security measures. But the recent successful hack on Binance has forced me to change my opinion about CEX. Now if hackers can go after Binance then they can do that in future too with other state of the art exchanges also.

As a crypto user, we need to learn from these incidents that exchanges are vulnerable and best way to store our crypto is to use wallets that gives us full control of the keys.

Who told you that exchanges couldn’t be hacked? Anything created by humans can be broken into. And I’ve seen proof of that once again. This didn’t come as a surprise to me. On the contrary, I was expecting this to happen. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.

Even after all this, measures will be taken to strengthen security, but that still offers no guarantees.

Is there any way to avoid losing funds? Yes: diversify your capital. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

You're right. Nothing is completely risk free, especially in a relatively young market like crypto. It's not just the exchanges, even HW and non custodial wallets can't guarantee absolute security.

Just because some haven't had an incident yet doesn't mean they have no vulnerabilities or won't run into problems down the road. Especially with how fast AI and tech are moving these days.

All we can do is keep risk to a minimum, by diversifying our assets and where we store them, and stacking multiple layers of security.

[Synchronice]

I once read a post on X that was quite interesting a few weeks ago, but I forgot not to save the post, so I can't give the reference as a thread that was created, but I remember what it said, with a sentence like this;

Perps was hacked
DeFi was hacked
CEX was hacked
DEX was hacked
Prediction Market was hacked
Hot Wallet was hacked
Cold Wallet was hacked
Hardware Wallet was hacked

There is no safe place to store money, so where should we store it?

Cold Wallet was hacked is not the right thing to say because cold wallet wasn't hacked recently. Cold wallet is a wallet that keeps your private keys completely offline and when you want to sign a transaction, you need to connect cold wallet to online device. You probably wanted to say ColdCard wallet and that's a different case, that's part of the hardware wallet.

To my mind, today, the safest way to store your money is an air-gapped desktop or a laptop computer. I would probably pick an elder model of computer or laptop and use that.

[Unknown Op]

The more reason you shouldn't store all your money in just one wallet. If you have one wallet from this brand, the next brand should be different. The same thing goes for non-custodial wallets. One wallet per app/software. Most importantly, don't visit random sites and click any ads. If you can't stop yourself from doing it, it would be better if you had a separate phone mainly for wallets. With all the hacking incidents, what you need to do now is be extra careful.

I completely agree that extra care is very much necessary but I don't think that I would underestimate the risk to every individual crypto user. Traditional financial institutions have dedicated security teams, and they may hold more money. They have proper monitoring systems and recovery procedures. Whereas an ordinary crypto user can lose everything that they have through one strong attack and in return, have very little chance of recovering the funds. This is because of AI; it is making all of these attacks easier to launch. So devices should be protected against these attacks, securing private keys and also trying to avoid any sort of suspicious link.

[bangjoe]

One of the safest that we discussed about were wallets on airfapped devices. You can use your old laptop as an airgapped device and set up an Electrum wallet on it.

The safest is a multisig wallet generated on different devices. You can use a hardware wallet that is completely open source and two online wallets that are also completely open source to set up 2-of-3 multisig wallet.

I've read the whole thing and the most interesting thing about saving our money is what Charles-Tim has to say


"One of the safest that we discussed about were wallets on airfapped devices. You can use your old laptop as an airgapped device and set up an Electrum wallet on it.

The safest is a multisig wallet generated on different devices. You can use a hardware wallet that is completely open source and two online wallets that are also completely open source to set up 2-of-3 multisig wallet"¹

This can be the safest solution, at least for now, and yes I get the same advice but using the Iphone as a wallet isolated from the internet, or just aiming to be a wallet, without other activities like we use smartphones in general, some people who advise me Iphone has better security than others.

[fruktik]

You're right. Nothing is completely risk free, especially in a relatively young market like crypto. It's not just the exchanges, even HW and non custodial wallets can't guarantee absolute security.

Just because some haven't had an incident yet doesn't mean they have no vulnerabilities or won't run into problems down the road. Especially with how fast AI and tech are moving these days.

All we can do is keep risk to a minimum, by diversifying our assets and where we store them, and stacking multiple layers of security.

There was a time when I lost access to my email. You might think, “What’s the big deal?”… But after that, I couldn’t log in to the crypto exchange because the account login verification requires a code that’s sent via email. I was saved by the fact that I contacted support in time. But they weren’t able to recover some of the funds. So I just had to write them off.

Since then, I no longer keep all my money on a single exchange. I try to spread it out.