Episode 6- Protect Yourself As You Profit: How To Avoid Dangers Lurking In The Crypto World

Summary: We have brought back one of our favourite guests for this episode. Hit play and listen to Paul Walsh from MetaCert, who talks about how important it is to stay safe in the crypto communities on various platforms and how you can take measures to prevent attacks! ABOUT THE GUEST On today’s episode, we have one of our previous guests, Paul walsh who’s been ensuring safety whilst clicking on links. Paul is the founder of MetaCert, a security company that protects the crypto community from phishing attacks on mainstream messaging applications. He co-instigated the creation of the W3C Standard for URL Classification/Content Labelling and is one of the seven original Founders of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative. He owns a full patent for the checking of URIs for Malware and Phishing inside mobile apps. WHAT’S NEW? (2.36) We have been in the cryptocurrency world for 4 weeks now and we've already hit a 100 million messages inside slack alone. This shows how big our utility is. The number of people who received an alert is 58 k who are members of the community. And the total number of alerts should be more than that according to me. But these are the people who have MetaCert. The only other security app relying on other companies like MetaCert to secure slack hit 16 million but we have 1.2 billion messages on the whole with 1 million in the crypto world HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN SAVED FROM MALICIOUS LINKS? (6:11) We're monitoring all that and logging it all. We plan to build a global central threat intelligence system. When we are monitoring communities, we see attacks happening over multiple communities with the same person being the culprit sometimes. We have come up with a way to stop attacks as soon as they are on slack API or chat bots. As soon as they happen, we catch the culprit who'll be immediately blocked. That website will be labelled. So that other people will know. The person will be banned. This will thus be based on behaviour of phishers. SHOULDN'T THIS BE ON SLACK OR ANY OTHER SIMILAR PLATFORM ORGANICALLY? THAN JUST COMMUNITIES? (11:14) We had a talk with slack and they are not interested in working with us. They wanted to use Google safe browsing API. In my opinion that's a bad decision because I have a full patent and MetaCert already has the world's biggest advance threat intelligence system which would react much more quickly to phishing attacks. We're able to classify attacks in a way Google can't. Maybe they'll realise our advantage in the future. Slack is designed for communities where by you verify the integrity of the person who joined. It wasn't designed to cope with communities where you would have people joining it without knowing if they can be trusted. Most companies with a huge number of employees are concerned a lot about internal hacks compared to external hacks. Humans are the weakest links not the software. What I articulated to slack was that they need to be mindful about communities because they comprise of thousands of powerful people are working in big companies who're probably going to never use slack in case there's a problem with security. This would be a huge customer loss for slack. And Instead of saying we don't support communities they need to take actions to protect them. WHAT ABOUT TELEGRAM? YOU SAID THAT YOU WEREN'T ON IT THE LAST TIME WE SPOKE (13:31) We’re currently doubling down on slack which is a bigger challenge for the vast majority of people in crypto. Thus, we're not working on telegram now. We're working on browser add-ons which will protect you in a similar way our slack app does. We will put telegram on the roadmap. Nothing until 3-4 months. Which we realise is a long-term in the crypto world. ARE YOU LOOKING AT OTHER THREATS OR JUST PHISHING? (15:16) We’re looking at Wallet address. When you open a website, which is verified you are able to see the URL in green. We want to do something similar with wallet addresses I h(continued)