The PAYTECH Book

PayTech and Blockchain: Adjusting for Security and Risk

By Georgios Raikos

CEO, Talk on Strategy Ltd

Risk Estimates Rise Out of Proportion

In cyberspace, the risk of a security attack is increasing by the hour. The following year-on-year statistics, released for the period ending December 2018, paint a grim picture for the effectiveness of cyber-crime and the growing attack surface:

• Attacks to corporate web servers grew by 50%.
• 10% of URLs on a global scale carried some type of malware.
• Ransomware hit 1 in 3 of mobile devices in just one year.
• Malicious emails increased by another 50%, with phishing attacks still providing very high success yields for cybercriminals.
• Crypto-mining/crypto-jacking continued to infect millions of victims’ CPUs, usually via browser-based coin miners with injected scripts.
• Attack groups became more consolidated and aimed at large – even sovereign – targets, with the aim of destroying the infrastructure. At times, their attack vector included 50+ simultaneous targets, making it almost impossible to defend.
• WannaMine, a sister malware of WannaCry – employing the MSH.Bluwimps crypto-jacking script – successfully entered large enterprise networks with the dual scope of DDoS attacks and near 100% CPU crypto-mining utilization.

The Decentralized Nature of Blockchain is Also its “Achilles Heel”

The initial crypto-mining of blockchain has attracted diversified uses, with a somewhat inadequate proof of concept. PayTech and FinTech have already made ...