Crypto exchange Coinbase launched a significant fund migration on Saturday, moving tokens to recent internal wallets in a planned, routine security procedure to cut back the long-term exposure of holding funds in the identical wallet addresses which might be publicly known.
According to a press release from the corporate, the migration was not attributable to cybersecurity breaches or external threats. Coinbase said:
“Periodic wallet migration is a widely accepted best practice that minimizes long-term exposure to funds. This is a planned migration and is unrelated to industry changes or pricing conditions. This will not be a response to an information breach or external threat.” Source: Coinbase
This signifies that large on-chain Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and other token balances will likely be moved from Coinbase wallets to other internal Coinbase wallets which might be already marked by blockchain explorers and intelligence platforms.
Coinbase warned users that throughout the migration, fraudsters may attempt to benefit from the situation by impersonating Coinbase representatives and contacting customers to request login credentials or asking users to maneuver funds, something the exchange never does
The warning serves as a reminder that crypto users must remain vigilant against phishing attempts, hacks, scams and other cybersecurity attacks in an ever-evolving threat landscape.
Unused balances could be an insider tip for hackers: Why often shifting funds is a proven method
Hackers goal centralized servers, information systems, and hot crypto wallets connected to the Internet to extract information and value from users.
These centralized repositories, which contain massive amounts of knowledge or tokens, are attractive to threat actors, who often plan these attacks for months and think about the big centralized systems as honeypots.
The emergence of artificial intelligence and AI-powered tools also gives hackers a bonus in compiling heuristic clues from publicly known information and other metadata that may compromise sensitive information or result in theft, cybersecurity experts tell Cointelegraph.
Quantum computing also poses a threat to current cryptographic technology that will not be far in the longer term but may have already got retroactively occurred, Gianluca Di Bella, a sensible contract and zero-knowledge proof (ZK) researcher, told Cointelegraph.
Threat actors could now compile public crypto keys until a sufficiently powerful quantum computer is invented.
Then the quantum computer can derive the private key from the general public address in a “harvest now, decrypt later” attack, Di Bella told Cointelegraph.
Cryptographic protocols must move to post-quantum security standards as quickly as possible to neutralize the specter of retroactive hacking, Di Bella said.
