Poloniex : Safe ?
Any place with money is not safe , a famous saying comes to my mind..
" Because that’s where the money is"
Willie Sutton, a famous 20th century American bank robber
So is Poloniex safe ? We don't know. Let's have a look...
What happened in 2014?
The Poloniex exchange was launched in 2014 and just after the launch it was a victim of a major hack and lost considerable amount of funds. Over 12% of bitcoin in Poloniex exchange was stolen. Busoni , the owner of Poloniex stated that the hackers have found a way to processes withdrawals using a flaw in Poloniex site's code. Hackers have found that system software do not quickly notice the negative balances for multiple withdrawal which are processed parallelly at the same time. The whole incident was explained through a official notice in bitcointalkWhat happened in 2019?
This incident created lot of news in social medias. What happened is someone put a list of passwords and emails on twitter mentioning that they are login information's for Poloniex accounts.
The “Poloniex emails and passwords” announced on Twitter seem to have been from a previous, unknown breach, and the crooks were simply chancing their arm by guessing that at least some of the account names and password might also work on the Poloniex site.Poloniex claims that just 5% of the users in the “hacked list” were actually Poloniex customers at all, and that 90% of the accounts in the list were already in the well-known haveibeenpwned database that tries to keep track of the billions of already-discovered breached records that are circulating online.
Source
So most of the account details leaked seemed to be likes they were not belong to Poloniex. But Poloniex asked every user to update their passwords. There is no report that claims any lost of funds. So this can't be considered as a failure like the 2014 incident.
What is the current security status of Poloniex ?
Now we know the 2 security issues happened in the history of Poloniex exchange. Despite of those two cases there were no an other single incident. I see Poloniex has successfully recovered and it's a very reliable exchange now. Currently Poloniex is strengthen by following security strategies.
- DNS cache protection system based on cryptographic signatures
- Session activity , history monitoring
- User funds are stored in cold wallets.
- Users personal data protection using role accounts
- Unauthorized changes in website restricted by a registry lock
- In Poloniex Two-factor authentication is available .
- Protection for DoS type attacks.
- Email verification system and IP address lockouts.
- Security against robot infiltration type web attacks
And I must specially mention that now Poloniex do not request your personal information to use the exchange platform. You can trade anonymously.. so no one can sell or use your personal data. It's a really good news for traders who like to protect their financial privacy.
Conclusion
It's true that Poloniex exchange faced major security issues in the fast. But now we can see that Poloniex has improved in all most all the aspects and it's stable. When looking at the current security features of the exchange it looks reliable according to my point of view. It follows almost all the security strategies followed by all the other leading exchanges. My final conclusion is, Poloniex is a safe exchange now and it's time to start trading with this platform
References
[1]Poloniex Crypto Exchange Discloses Data Leak
[2]Cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex issues password reset warning
[3]Poloniex Review
[4]Bitcoin Exchange Poloniex Hacked
No exchange is safe. Get yer money outta there.
...money has to flow and work, so you have to split your wealth in more than one part not to lose all at once, money, even when it is crypto, is everywhere at risk even on a paperwallet or a hardware-wallet when one knows the phrase.
There is no 100% security nowhere there is in every case a workaround to come to the money you just had to figure it out !
I put all my money into Cheese. No matter what happens, people will want cheese. 200% security garunteed.
Poloniex is my first favourite. I first started crypto trading there and continued for years without any problems. When it said it would stop listing DGB and XBC, I had to leave there because most of my portfolio was in these two cryptos. I know it is safer now but they are far from the old trading volumes as far as I can remember.