Tag Archive for: ‘Hot

Are Cold Wallets Safer Than Hot Wallets For Storing Your Crypto Keys?

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Recently, hackers stole around $5.2 million worth of Solana from 8,000 hot wallets, such as Phantom, Slope, and Trust. Solana claimed that the security vulnerability was in the code of the third-party wallets and not in their own. 

Now in the light of such revelations, cyber experts are debating whether crypto investors should store their private keys in cold wallets in order to secure their crypto holdings from such cyber hacking.

Incidentally, Peck Shield Alert, a security firm has Tweeted that around $8,000 worth Stablecoin and Solana have been stolen. Besides, Solana has also struggled with security issues in the past, and now, probes has revealed that as many as four addresses were linked to the hacker. 

Crypto investing has come in vogue of late as they are considered the currencies of tomorrow. They are based on the Blockchain, and will be the native currency in the WEB3 space, the new digital world that we will be able to access in a few years using virtual reality.

Central banks across the world, including the Reserve Bank of India have announced they will be launching the central bank digital currency (CBDC) soon. As we usher towards this new world, the important question that now rises is how we can keep our money safe.

Technically, you can store crypto in a custodial wallet, where they do not provide you with a private key. Else, you can choose a hot wallet where your private key is stored in a browser extension or a desktop application, and lastly there is the most secure of all, the cold wallet, where you store your key in a hardware wallet. Keeping the private key secure is the most important piece of the puzzle.

Let us understand the concept of hot and cold wallets in detail.

Hot Wallets

Hot wallets include Web-based wallets (browser extension), mobile wallets, and desktop wallets. They are all connected to the Internet. In other words, if your system gets compromised, or if the hot wallet you use has security vulnerabilities, like in the Solana hacking case, where hackers stole the private key from inactive crypto Slope, Trust, and Phantom wallets, hackers can steal your private keys and drain your wallet. They can use a crypto tumbler…

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Computer science enrollment soars, powered by hot job market – News

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Enrollment is up more than 300 percent in the Department of Computer Science. Students and alumni of the B.A. and B.S. programs in computer science explain what attracted them to the field and to UAB.

Written by: Matt Windsor
Media contact: Brianna Hoge

Carlos Valencia InsideCarlos Rivas-Valencia, a senior in the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science program in the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Department of Computer ScienceEveryone knows that a computer science degree is a ticket to a bright future. The researchers at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics make the numerical argument: They note that software development, one common computer science career option, has a current median national pay of $110,140. And the BLS foresees 22% growth in openings — more than 400,000 new jobs — through 2030.

Carlos Rivas-Valencia, a senior in the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science program in the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Department of Computer Science, sums up the appeal in terms of possibility.

“It opens so many doors and opportunities,” he said. “I can dive into medicine, business, education or any other sector and go from building computer programs that help doctors better diagnose patients to working on the new self-driving cars.”

Rivas-Valencia is interested in becoming a software engineer. Even before he graduates, he will have completed internships at two big-name companies. Last summer, he had a software engineering role at Khan Academy, the open-education company, working alongside full-time engineers on the Frontend Infrastructure team, where he built new user-interface components, fixed bugs and wrote documentation on his changes.

This summer, he will again be working as a software engineer at the San Francisco offices of Lyft — one of several companies that has made a major investment in self-driving cars.

But not everyone starts out knowing they might be interested in a future in computer science. Amalee Dianne Wilson, a two-time UAB computer science grad (B.S. 2016, M.S. 2018) now pursuing her Ph.D. in the heart of Silicon Valley at Stanford University, started off in that group.

“A lot of people in computer science started programming when…

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How London become 2021’s hub for hot new tech IPOs – Fortune

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How London become 2021’s hub for hot new tech IPOs  Fortune

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Monthslong hacking campaign deemed grave threat to U.S. national security puts Microsoft in hot seat

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The sprawling hacking campaign deemed a grave threat to U.S. national security came to be known as SolarWinds, for the company whose software update was seeded by Russian intelligence agents with malware to penetrate sensitive government and private networks.

Yet it was Microsoft whose code the cyber spies persistently abused in the campaign’s second stage, rifling through emails and other files of such high-value targets as then-acting Homeland Security chief Chad Wolf — and hopping undetected among victim networks.

This has put the world’s third-most valuable company in the hot seat. Because its products are a de facto monoculture in government and industry — with more than 85% market share — federal lawmakers are insisting that Microsoft swiftly upgrade security to what they say it should have provided in the first place, and without fleecing taxpayers.

Seeking to assuage concerns, Microsoft this past week offered all federal agencies a year of “advanced” security features at no extra charge. But it also seeks to deflect blame, saying it is customers who do not always make security a priority.

Risks in Microsoft’s foreign dealings also came into relief when the Biden administration imposed sanctions Thursday on a half-dozen Russian IT companies it said support Kremlin hacking. Most prominent was Positive Technologies, which was among more than 80 companies that Microsoft has supplied with early access to data on vulnerabilities detected in its products. Following the sanctions announcement, Microsoft said Positive Tech was no longer in the program and removed its name from a list of participants on its website.

The SolarWinds hackers took full advantage of what George Kurtz, CEO of top cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, called “systematic weaknesses” in key elements of Microsoft code to mine at least nine U.S. government agencies — the departments of Justice and Treasury, among them — and more than 100 private companies and think tanks, including software and telecommunications providers.

The SolarWinds hackers’ abuse of Microsoft’s identity and access architecture — which validates users’ identities and grants them…

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