On-Demand Webinar: Into the Cryptoverse

In the span of a few years, cryptocurrencies have gone from
laughingstock and novelty to a serious financial instrument, and a
major sector in high-tech. The price of Bitcoin and Ethereum has
gone from single dollars to thousands, and they’re increasingly in
the mainstream.

This is undoubtedly a positive development, as it opens new
avenues for finance, transactions, tech developments, and more.
Unfortunately, no innovation is without its dark side, and the
crypto industry is no exception. A new webinar from XDR provider
Cynet (you can see it here^[1]) dives deeper into this
dark corner to explore the intersection of cybersecurity and
cryptocurrency.

The first question is how, exactly, cryptocurrency creates
security vulnerabilities for organizations. There’s no single
answer, and in many cases, the results are more indirect. This
bears closer inspection, and the webinar, led by Cynet
CyOps Analyst Ronen Ahdut, studies the different
ways cryptocurrencies are used by attackers.

Into the mainstream, for better or worse

It’s hard to argue that having greater access to financial tools
is a bad thing, but the nature of cryptocurrency is ideal for
threat actors to leverage against organizations and users. One of
the most common ways this occurs is with ransomware.

In the past, ransomware attacks ran the risk of being easily
detected – law enforcement can track the movement of fiat
currencies through a banking network, and finding the data being
stolen wasn’t impossibly difficult. Cryptocurrencies – especially
“privacy-focused” ones like Monero make it much harder to track and
understand where funds are going, or who is behind them.

Similarly, cryptomining and cryptojacking tools have become
incredibly popular tools deployed by malicious actors to leverage
victims’ resources and impact their organizations. These new
threats require different approaches to confront, and a deeper
understanding of how they work.

The webinar discusses:

• The basics of cryptocurrencies and the history behind
  the technology. To gain a deeper understanding of how and
  why cryptocurrencies have become popular among threat actors, it’s
  important to comprehend where they come from, and how their basic
  structure lends itself to these activities.
• The intersection of cryptocurrency and
  cybersecurity. Cryptocurrencies don’t exist in a vacuum,
  and as soon as they become potential threats, cybersecurity teams
  need to react and become aware of what the risks are. The
  intersection of these two fields is ripe for discovery.
• The techniques attackers use to infiltrate
  networks. Most crypto-based attacks aren’t overt brute
  force incidents. Instead, they require subtlety and stealth. To
  this end, attackers look for increasingly inventive ways to
  infiltrate networks and deploy their payloads long before anyone
  can detect them.
• How organizations can defend themselves, and how Cynet
  can help. It’s not enough to know that something is
  happening. To resolve the issue, organizations need the right
  mentality and the proper tools to defend themselves. The webinar
  will discuss techniques to detect, contain, mitigate, and defeat
  these attacks. It will also cover how Cynet can help organizations
  defend themselves.

You can watch the webinar now. Find the on-demand recording here^[2].