Nicholas Percoco on Defending the Crypto Honeypot - WBD129

Exchange hacks have been a constant thorn in the side of the industry. Where a physical bank robbery of $millions will make headline news, a +$100m exchange hack will barely break out of the crypto news media. Exchange hacks are now so commonplace that a recent report from Ledger’s CEO Eric Larcheveque found that the equivalent of $2.7 million a day was stolen from exchanges last year.

Almost all major exchanges have experienced a hack of some kind, from Mt. Gox which could have destroyed the industry to Poloniex and Bitfinex, and more recently Binance and Cryptopia, the list goes on and on. 

As such, security is one of the biggest challenges faced by any exchange and there are very few that haven’t suffered from a breach, one that has managed to remain unscathed is Kraken. With attacks becoming more sophisticated and hackers working 24/7 to find vulnerabilities how is that Kraken has managed to succeed where so many others failed?

The man in charge of this roll at Kraken is Nick Percoco, their Chief Security Officer. In this interview we discuss:

• Ethical hacking
• Finding critical vulnerabilities in iOS
• Vulnerability brokers
• Kraken’s company-wide security culture
• The difficulties in disclosing vulnerabilities
• Kraken Security Labs