2020 has been a year few of us will forget any time soon, and as businesses clamor to either stay afloat or weather the storm the COVID-19 pandemic has caused -- let alone everything else that's happened over the past 12 months -- in the criminal underground, business is booming.
Of particular interest to cyberattackers over the past few years is cryptocurrency. An alternative to traditional, bank-controlled fiat currency, cryptocurrency has evolved from the Wild West in speculative trading to something more akin to a stable financial structure, projects of which are supported by blockchain technologies, an area now being explored by tech giants including IBM[1], Google[2], and Microsoft[3].
However, many blockchain and cryptocurrency-related technologies are still experimental and speculative; vulnerabilities can lead to wallets -- and the crypto stored within -- becoming compromised, and there are still cases of exit scams and fraudulent coin launches, known as Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).
Cases of data breaches, theft, and investor losses are still very much in existence. Below are the worst recorded incidents, month by month, over the course of 2020.
January:
- Poloniex[4]: Poloniex disclosed a data breach and forced a mass password reset for users after credentials were leaked across social media.
February:
- Helix[5]: An Ohio man was arrested for running the Helix Bitcoin mixing service. An estimated $300 million was laundered through the mixer.
- Microsoft engineer theft[6]: A software engineer was convicted of stealing over $10 million from Microsoft.
- IOTA[7]: The IOTA Foundation shut down its entire network due to a hacker exploiting a vulnerability in the IOTA wallet app.
- Altsbit[8]: The Italian cryptocurrency exchange closed following an alleged cyberattack in which