One of the hallmark features of blockchain is that it is supposedly much more secure, adding remarkable levels of transparency that could help better identifyand mitigate cyber threats. But, at a time when we’re approaching 2,000 blockchain projects in development worldwide, watching thousands of crypto miners do their thing each day and seeing billions of investment dollars pouring in each year, are we taking warnings about potential threats seriously? Has the greater community taken some aspects of blockchain’s security for granted? The hard truths reveal affirmatives to both questions.
There are multiple ways that enthusiasts can contribute to their favorite blockchain projects – whether that’s mining, staking or operating all types of nodes. Regardless of what they’re doing, these private deployments require an investment of time, money and effort to set up, so the last thing anyone wants is to fall victim to hackers. Unfortunately, people often don’t invest as much energy in securing their deployments as they do in getting their different features to work and scale, making the hacker threat very real.
Various attacks have already been seen on mining software, and there have been multiple high-profile thefts that were worth a lot of money.