As crypto security continues to be a concern, RFA responds

By George Ralph

The Wall Street Journal, among other publications, reported on Friday that China had now declared crypto currency illegal in the country. This perhaps isn’t unexpected as it has long been known that China didn’t like the principal of crypto currencies. Chinese regulators have long worried that the decentralised and anonymous nature of cryptocurrency transactions could facilitate money laundering and the ease of illegal capital flight out of the country.

Their statement on the People’s Bank of China website was definitely a stronger message than we have heard before, stating cryptocurrency should not be circulated or used in the market and individuals or businesses working with overseas crypto businesses should not be allowed to continue to trade. It also said it was illegal for overseas exchanges to provide services to Chinese nationals. While exchanges have been banned within China for some time, individuals have been finding ways to trade currencies up until now.

This opens the door for Beijing’s push to develop a sate backed digital currency, which would potentially give rise to monitoring of not only the economy but also of the population. But China aren’t the only country looking at Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). With the continuous advancement of crypto acceptance by traditional companies and with more traditional managers considering adding crypto to their investment portfolios, we are seeing central banks across the world increasingly looking into the matter of state backed digital currencies. There are some major advantages to CBDC’s. Governments would be able to monitor the real time macroeconomic situation of the economy, in theory providing better implementation of monetary policy and compared to traditional money crypto could provider cheaper and faster transactions as well as better transparency with the right policies in place. The main negative is lack of privacy; access to individuals personal finances and investments would be opened up completely.

The fact remains that as the crypto market continues to develop, so does the ingenuity of the hackers that patrol it, looking for opportunities to breach exchanges so there remains a custody risk. As more institutional investors enter the space, cyber security is at the forefront of discussions. RFA has developed Application Lifecycle Management as an addition to our Data Management suite of services. Providing Code Security by applying a new principal of DevSecOps, we have developed continuous integration and deployment practice performs a static code analysis against security vulnerabilities during open source build processes. There have been several instances of theft at crypto funds that have been recognised as down to lack of code security. Code was manipulated by hackers to reroute funds while the company was unaware of the changes during deployment into production.

RFA’s wider managed security service combines continuous proactive monitoring of endpoints, networks, applications and web resources with user behaviour analytics and investigations by teams based in a dedicated Security Operations Centre (SOC). The ability to observe behaviour and activity continuously in real time and correlate the data across thousands of events each day means RFA’s preventative AI solutions have far better reach and scalability than traditional cybersecurity solutions.

Cyber criminals continue to develop new ways to breach digital platforms and applications. RFA are true innovators in the development space. Do get in touch if you would like to know more about how we can support your cybersecurity requirements.