Hackers once again deceive telecommunication companies to get cryptocurrency

The U.S. telecommunication operators let their consumers to change the operator without the change of number. One just has to call the company and ask an employee to re-link the telephone number to the new device. This option allows cyber criminals to launder cryptocurrencies totaling to millions and millions of dollars. They call to the telecommunication companies, pose as the owner of a certain number and re-link the number to their device, thus cheating via social engineering. After they take control of the victim’s telephone number, thieves then reset all passwords – Google, iCloud, all other accounts and get access to cryptocurrency wallets and withdraw all money from them. Naturally, the first victims of such hacks are successful cryptocurrency miners, investors and exchange participants. Those who plan to steal from them first finds them on the Internet and social media.

This issue was first raised by different media outlets a year ago, but nothing has changed since then. A new wave of these particular attacks has lately happened, Fortune and other outlets report. The media describes various cases when cryptocurrency entrepreneurs lost their coins equal to millions of dollars due to hacks. Decentralization, normally beneficial for market players, does not help here – transactions cannot be cancelled by the bank because there is no bank. Sometimes, however, the exchanges compensate losses and transactions are cancelled.

The problem is currently very difficult to solve. Telecommunications operators can’t guarantee the full vigilance of their call centers. Some cryptocurrency exchanges experiment with hard passwords – for example, the user verifies his identity by using a special flash drive to log in his wallet. Another counter-hack measure involves offline storages – the digital currency is stored on secure hard drives which never engage with the Internet. Yes, the stolen money can be tracked, as it was with the WannaCry case, but the criminals are aware of this and hide their traces with different methods.