This time I'm going to talk a little bit about security in your digital accounts like Poloniex, Localbitcoins, Uphold, etc. Some time ago, when I had little experience in the crypto-currency ecosystem, I dedicated myself to opening accounts on different platforms to save my money and invest a little, all of this brought on by the crisis that was beginning in my country Venezuela; a crisis that is now world famous. At the beginning of that crisis in mid-2015 when devaluation started to hit my pockets I found in the crypto currencies a safe place for my money, far from the economic policies of the state and safe from devaluation. My thinking was that these platforms were safe and that the money would be safe on them.
But what I didn't count on is that where there is value and where there is money there are also criminals who will not hesitate to take everything from you, these criminals are not what most people think (some hackers or some super gifted in technology); the reality is that they can be people close to you (scammers) who will use the information you carelessly give them to strip you of your value.
There are several methods through which they can steal your data; here are some of them:
1- Social engineering, this is nothing more than using various strategies to make you trust them and thus reveal sensitive information such as mail, age, country, etc. These scammers are often found in your circle of friends, because they know where you live, if you have children and so on. Once collected the necessary information is passed to another person who will enter your accounts, usually work in groups and believe me are patient to acquire the information.
- What they are looking for is not your account as such, they are trying to take over the recovery mail associated with your accounts, since with it they only have to change the passwords and leave you out long enough for them to transfer the money.
- The way to protect you from this very effective method, is to have an email created only for this purpose with security measures such as: sending msm to notify the entry to your mail, use a double factor to enter the mail and have a key that contains space, numbers, special characters, letters, etc. The word "baca" is more secure than "vaca" example: lavacalechera" is less secure than "1a_baca-1echera" both are easy to remember but one is more complicated than the other.
2- The data capture pages or "phishing": this is a very effective technique, since when locating your mail and not being able to enter they will look for stealing the data with this page which is a clone of the real one, by means of this page they will capture your data and they will redirect you to the network not to create suspicion.
- The phishing pages hide the address with a url shortener so you don't notice the difference and send it to you in the mail with the typical "Change of password" and/or "Technical support" in which they offer remuneration for your login.
The way to protect yourself from phishing pages is to always type the address in the search engine, never use a link to go to the account we have associated.
Finally you must activate the double factors. It is important that you copy the recovery seed of this double factor in a notebook, (never send it to the mail because it will be the first place where they search).
There are other methods of data theft, but these are the most common. In another article I will describe other more technical methods. I hope you like the information, thanks for reading me and remember that "Security is the responsibility of the user".
written by :@trabajosdelsiglo
Discord : trabajosdelsiglo#8699