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Banks Adopt Military-Style Tactics to Fight Cybercrime

• westurner 8y ago
  > In a windowless bunker here, a wall of monitors tracked incoming attacks — 267,322 in the last 24 hours, according to one hovering dial, or about three every second — as a dozen analysts stared at screens filled with snippets of computer code. > Cybercrime is one of the world’s fastest-growing and most lucrative industries. At least $445 billion was lost last year, up around 30 percent from just three years earlier, a global economic study found, and the Treasury Department recently designated cyberattacks as one of the greatest risks to the American financial sector. Is this type of monitoring possible (necessary, even) with blockchains? Blockchains generally silently disregard bad/invalid transactions. Where could discarded/disregarded transactions and forks be reported to in a decentralized blockchain system? Who would pay for log storage? How redundantly replicated should which data be? How DDOS resistant are centralized and decentralized blockchains? Exchanges have risk. In terms of credit fraud: some crypto asset exchanges do allow margin trading, many credit card companies either refuse transactions with known exchanges or charge cash advance interest rates, and all transactions are final. Exchanges hold private keys for customers' accounts, move a lot to offline cold storage, and maybe don't do a great job of explaining that YOU SHOULD NOT LEAVE MONEY ON AN EXCHANGE. One should transfer funds to a different account; such as a hardware or paper wallet or a custody service. Do/can crypto asset exchanges participate in these exercises? To what extent do/can blockchains help solve for aspects of our unfortunately growing cybercrime losses? Premined blockchains could reportedly handle card/chip/PIN transaction volumes today.