Cryptocurrency exchanges in some of Africa’s biggest bitcoin markets have been forced to rethink their security to thwart persistent attacks from hackers, a trend that has troubled trading platforms all around the world.
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The Worst Yet to Come for African Exchanges
Exchanges in the African continent have been relatively unscathed, suffering scant losses amidst the $930 million that’s been stolen from global exchanges so far this year, according to data by U.S. cyber security firm Ciphertrace.
The most notable assault on investor funds in the continent of 1.2 billion people happened around March in South Africa. It wasn’t a cyber attack on an exchange, but rather a scam. Fraudsters at BTC Global, a supposed cryptocurrency investment firm, made off with about one billion rand ($80 million) after 28,000 South Africans succumbed to the false promise of incredibly high, quick returns on their investment, police said.
As thefts have stoked exchanges worldwide, some African platforms have woken up to the need to strengthen their security to safeguard investor funds. This is particularly crucial in a continent where cryptocurrency markets are populated by people who trade with a certain degree of ignorance in many cases, lured by the promise of quick riches. Incidents of fraud or stolen money can smear a market struggling to build confidence in the absence of regulatory oversight.
“We have noticed a number of attempts to breach our system but we have managed to maintain our defenses and we keep on learning,” Suleiman Murunga, chief executive officer at Ugandan exchange Coinpesa, told news.Bitcoin.com.
“We (now) use suspicious activity monitoring tools to track user behavior in order to spot bad actors,” he said, adding that the company,
