Can Bitvavo be hacked?
Unfortunately, there are plenty of examples of crypto exchanges that have been hacked. After a hack, you often see that users lose almost all their crypto. In this article, we will examine in more detail whether the Bitvavo exchange can be hacked.
Can Bitvavo be hacked?
Unfortunately, a hack can never be ruled out. Even government agencies and large, professional banks get hacked from time to time. Fortunately, Bitvavo is doing everything possible to reduce the risk of hacks.
For example, most of the cryptos that the company manages are stored in cold wallets that are located in large vaults. On a daily basis, the amount of crypto assets that is likely to be needed is calculated. Only the required cryptos are moved to a live, online wallet, while the other crypto’s stay stored in offline, cold wallets.
Even if the company is hacked over the internet, it is impossible for all cryptos to be stolen. They also have an insurance that goes up to $255 million, which would limit losses.
Internally, the company is doing everything possible to prevent hacks. For example, you can only work at Bitvavo if you have a certificate of good conduct from the Dutch police. This ensures that there are no criminals working for the company.
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Protecting your Bitvavo account from phishing and hacks
Fortunately, a crypto exchange hack is very rare: it will not happen anytime soon. However, personal Bitvavo accounts are hacked more often. In this part of the article we will discuss how you can prevent your cryptos from being stolen by a hacker.
In any case, it is important to choose a strong password. A good password consists of both lower- and upper-case letters, numbers and special characters. You can use this website to automatically generate a strong password.
One major method hackers use to try to gain access are so-called phishing mails. A phishing mail appears to come from Bitvavo, but it does not. Then, when you log in, hackers can gain access to your account. You can set a special code that signs Bitvavo emails to make it easier to distinguish phishing emails from authentic Bitvavo emails.
Setting up two-factor authentication also reduces the chances of a hacker gaining access to your account, even if they manage to hack your password. With two-factor authentication, you have to confirm a login attempt with your mobile phone first, which the hacker should not be able to access.
If you want to protect yourself completely against hacks, you can also use a hardware wallet. This is an external device on which you can store cryptos without an internet connection. Keep in mind that sending cryptos to a cold wallet normally involves extra transaction fees.