Ransomware: Former director of the Global Financial Markets Center proposes cryptocurrency ban to prevent cyber theft
2 min readTL;DR Breakdown
• Lee Reiners calls for a ban on cryptocurrencies.
• Colonial Pipeline ransomware left southwest Texas without gas for six days.
The director of the Center for Global Financial Markets, Lee Reiners, says that removing the payment method preferred by hackers will prevent attacks. He said that cryptocurrencies should be banned to prevent ransomware attacks that affect national security.
The solutions that came out after the colonial hack are said to have an inadequate, inefficient structure. According to many experts, the best way to avoid data hijacking is by banning cryptocurrencies altogether.
In the past year, the FBI announced over 2,000 ransomware attacks. A research company predicted that by 2025 data attacks could increase by 700%.
Hackers are often looking to make a business stagger for money by stealing its files. These cyber-attacks also include stealing data, credentials or attacking a company’s backup systems.
Lee Reiners is against ransomware
Reiners believes that you can live in a world with cryptocurrencies or in a universe without ransomware, but not both. The Global Financial Market Director is against data hijacking, affecting the crypto market.
Colonial Pipeline director Joseph Blount said he had to pay $4.4 million to rescue the company’s data. Many national security experts say companies should not pay for these data ransoms because they motivate other hackers to act.
Colonial Pipeline is over 5,500 miles from Texas to New Jersey, with secondary lines off the radar. The cyberattack on this company caused a gas shortage for six days, which was devastating.
Faced with such ransomware, the Biden Administration has increased the number of agents assigned to the internal tax service in the United States. Biden proposes that companies have to report BTC transactions that exceed $10 billion.
BTC is not the problem of cyberattacks, analysts
Crypto enthusiasts think that BTC represents a small part only of the ransomware problem which is much more significant. Monetary networks, whether fiduciary or decentralized, have value and are therefore attractive to hackers. Although BTC is used for nefarious transactions, it represents only 0.5% compared to the problems that fiduciary networks have brought.
Although the theft in fiat networks is constant, it has not been enough to prohibit their trade, but with BTC, there’s a different dynamic. Many analysts ask for equality in these monetary networks and not blame BTC for a years-old problem.
The analysis company in Blockchain, Chainalysis, clarifies that the illegal use of cryptocurrencies fell from $21.4 million in 2019 to $10 million in 2020. This loss of interest is caused because Blockchain technology has increased its security and its fights against crime with cryptocurrencies.
But Reiners says that cryptocurrencies turn out to be attractive to criminals because it gives them anonymity. It is likely that with this increase in data theft in the United States, Blockchain will also increase its level of security.
