It’s a cliche, but a justified cliche, to describe the cryptocurrency space as a ‘wild west’, says G4S Risk Consulting, an arm of the multi-national security firm G4S. How are cryptocurrency exchanges to do security?
briefly, cryptocurrency trading is fast growing. It operates like many financial markets, with buyers and sellers mediated by an exchange in the middle. The key difference is that in the absence of a central bank, the exchange can become the main repository for the digital asset …. a potential vulnerability.
Dominic MacIver is a Senior Risk Analyst at G4S Risk Consulting. He says: “Our clients approach us to discuss solutions to their requirements because of G4S Cash Solutions’ experience in protecting high-value items and G4S Risk Consulting’s experience in developing bespoke solutions to complex challenges. Working with our clients, we are continuously applying their expert knowledge of crypto-assets and our best practice in physical security to a sector at the cutting edge of financial technology.
“The original goal of cryptocurrencies was to redesign the fundamental architecture of money. Although some early adopters have made enormous returns, the sector has attracted the same old threats for financial systems, including robbers, scammers, market manipulators and many others. Our innovative security solution helps protect against some of those threats by taking the assets offline and storing them in high-security vaults. This gives people and businesses peace of mind to trust that their crypto-assets are secure.
Online wallets have been a choice for many with cryptocurrency, but these are still vulnerable to theft, as they are only as secure as your computers are from hackers.
Dominic said: “Offline storage has become a more established and secure way of storing crypto-assets. At the same time, violent robberies and kidnappings in recent years have shown that the sector is still exposed to conventional criminal threats. In collaboration with our client, our security solution is built on a foundation of ‘vault storage’. We not only take the assets offline, but break them up into fragments that are independently without value and store them securely in our high security vaults, out of reach of cyber criminals and armed robbers alike”.
“Access to these sites is heavily restricted with multiple layers of security and robust protocols, and only when all the fragments are combined with specific technology can they unlock access to the value stored within.”
In April, G4S published a World Cash Report, which suggested that despite the global rise in card, digital and mobile transactions, cash use is still growing and it remains hugely important and widely used by people on all continents.
