We continue to learn about cybersecurity and technologies such as Blockchain as part of the C1b3RWALL Academy 2021 program which so far has more than 50,000 active users. This week we have started Module 6 “Threat Agents”.

Gabi Urrutia, Director of Security at Halborn participated with a keynote entitled “Threat Agents in Blockchain”. The objective of his lecture was to identify the main threat agents that we find in Blockchain. Besides being director of Halborn, Gabriel has been the head of SOC Joint Command Cyberspace for 3 years and has a master’s degree in Cybersecurity from Carlos III University.

Threat agents in Blockchain

External agents

External agents often use social engineering, attack groups to spread the message and then attack individuals. They have seen that there is great economic power in DeFi and intend to exploit it. They have powerful DDoS machines and write to the organization announcing that its website is at a great risk. If they get paid, they will tell the organization how to fix it; the Russian Booters attack is an example.

Internal agents

Within a DeFi project, insiders are known as rug-pullers. They take advantage of community trust or project hype.

  • Rug-pull. A fictitious project, Carpet.Finance, pushes out a token called $CRP. The (anonymous) owners mint 10 billion tokens and keep 20%. Their website is attractive and they tokenize shipments and users get rewards for buying. They have a large community on Telegram (30,000 users) even before they release the token. Then, the organization requests the token audit and liquidity pool. Once the token comes out, it gets $20M in the first hour, and users start putting liquidity into the pool. In 10 days the price goes up exponentially.
  • Pretending to be an insider. Another way to steal funds in DeFi projects is to pretend to be an insider. The attacker locates the release of a new token and conducts a survey of the Telegram pool or other groups. He invites all those participants to a fake group and tells them that the launch is going to be preempted, even with a fake website that looks legitimate.

Blockchain cybersecurity is becoming very similar to traditional cybersecurity. Threat actors are primarily motivated by an economic aspect, although in the future it is likely that DeFi companies will be attacked rather than users.

We still have a lot to learn in this area, so I invite you to watch Gabriel’s talk, which will not only be interesting but will also provide you with knowledge about Blockchain technology.

You can read the full article on News 365. 

If you are interested in this technology, the BISITE Research Group of the University of Salamanca offers quality courses taught by experienced professors and the possibility of doing internships in companies in the sector.

Posted by Juan M. Corchado

Juan Manuel Corchado (15 May 1971, Salamanca, Spain) is Professor at the University of Salamanca. He has been Vice-Rector for Research from 2013 to 2017 and Director of the Science Park of the University of Salamanca. Elected as Dean of the Faculty of Science twice, he holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Salamanca and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of the West of Scotland. He leads the renowned BISITE (Bioinformatics, Intelligent Systems and Educational Technology) Research Group, created in 2000. Director of the IoT Digital Innovation Hub and President of the AIR Institute, J. M. Corchado is also Visiting Professor at the Osaka Institute of Technology since January 2015, Visiting Professor at the Universiti Malaysia Kelantan and Member of the Advisory Group on Online Terrorist Propaganda of the European Counter Terrorism Centre (EUROPOL). J. M. Corchado has been president of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society, and academic coordinator of the University Institute for Research in Art and Animation Technology at the University of Salamanca, as well as researcher at the Universities of Paisley (UK), Vigo (Spain) and the Plymouth Marine Laboratory (UK). He currently combines all his activity with the direction of Master programmes in Security, Digital Animation, Mobile Telephony, Information Systems Management, Internet of Things, Social Media, 3D Design and Printing, Blockchain, Z System, Industry 4.0, Agile Project Management, and Smart Cities & Intelligent Buildings, at the University of Salamanca and his work as editor-in-chief of the journals ADCAIJ (Advances in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence Journal), OJCST (Oriental Journal of Computer Science and Technology) or Electronics MDPI (Computer Science & Engineering section). J. M. Corchado mainly works on projects related to Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain, IoT, Fog Computing, Edge Computing, Smart Cities, Smart Grids and Sentiment Analysis. He has recently been included in the board of trustees of the AstraZeneca Foundation, along with other health professionals and researchers recognised for bringing scientific knowledge closer to society.

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