Cryptocurrency users all over the world have shown a great interest in the IOTA project. Thanks to its Tangle technology, this particular currency could certainly introduce some interesting changes to the industry as a whole. Even in the world of IOTA, however, there is a chance that your wallet balance will be stolen. Various users have been affected by a rather strange “hack”, although it wouldn’t have happened if these users hadn’t generated their seeds online. Such a course of action is never advised whatsoever.
Unusual IOTA Theft could have been prevented
In the world of cryptocurrency, users can either choose to do things the hard way or use far more convenient solutions. In the latter case, the risk of eventually losing one’s money is a lot higher, but most people are confident nothing will happen to them. For some IOTA users, their worst fears suddenly became reality. Generating an IOTA seed online is convenient, but it is neither a secure nor advisable solution.
Indeed, several users have complained that their balances have gone missing all of a sudden. All of these incidents involve users who generated seeds online and are now paying the price for this gross negligence. There is a very detailed guide on how to properly generate a secure IOTA seed, yet some people can’t even be bothered to follow simple instructions. Cryptocurrency gives users a lot of power, but also a great deal of responsibility.
In other words, this “theft” was not due to a fault in the IOTA technology. It is good to know that the network is a bit more secure compared to Ethereum in this regard, although that doesn’t mean such exploits will not be discovered in the future. However, it is only due to user negligence that these thefts were even remotely possible. Negligence is never a good thing, especially not when it comes to generating something as important as a unique seed.
The only generator in question goes by the name of Iotaseed. This particular service helps users skip all of the aforementioned guide’s steps for creating a seed and provides a far more simple and convenient solution. Unfortunately, using such online services is asking for trouble down the line. It is unclear why users of this service were only now affected, but it is possible the site’s operators collected dozens of seeds before making their move.
Right now, this shady platform is still online and operating as normal. It is certainly possible the platform got compromised in one way or another, but that would also mean it kept a copy of every generated seed on its servers. Regardless of what the real reason behind this theft is, things are not looking all that great for whoever operates Iotaseed. We do not know how many users have been affected by this theft, but it is likely we are talking about several dozen IOTA enthusiasts.
Incidents like these are nothing new in the cryptocurrency world. Criminals have targeted this particular industry for quite some time now, and it seems they will continue to step up their game. There was also a successful DDoS attack against most IOTA full nodes this week. By taking these nodes offline, criminals successfully prevented victims from reclaiming their stolen money. It’s a very troublesome turn of events; that much is certain.
