How not to Lose Your Coins – Cryptocurrency Security Guide

You need to be very careful with cryptocurrencies. Not only can your investment temporarily lose value due to market volatility, but you can lose your tokens forever if you don’t follow the basic safety guidelines. The revolutionary feature of crypto is that you get full control over your money. Nobody can take it from you unless you don’t hand the keys to them.

Avoiding the human error

In the social media channels or discussion forums, you can often read a story of someone who lost big money in crypto. There are several threads like this in the support forums of the most popular wallets.

Almost in all cases, the reason is not a technical flaw, but a human error. The crypto user has either mixed up the password, or the keys, or has fallen victim to scammers.

The best way to deal with the price volatility is to limit your crypto investment to your spare money. Don’t buy Bitcoin or altcoins using the money you need for living, or your existential savings, and in any case don’t do it with borrowed money. It’s as simple as that. If you follow this rule, you will be able to calmly go through even the deepest bear market, waiting for the independent digital currencies to triumph in the long run, when the global monetary system collapses on debt and inflation.

Nevertheless, cryptocurrency security is even more important. Don’t lose your stash and don’t have it stolen from you.

The highest security standards

The SimpleFX team has been running a large-scale cryptocurrency business for retail customers since 2014, and we have learned a lot during that time. We stand against all types of crime and we want you all to learn how to minimize the chance of losing your digital money. Feel free to show this guide to your parents, and your children, and always be aware that there are people trying to still money from you.

Be aware that no one should call you from our company nor write any kind of message suggesting that he will willingly help you invest. We never ask anyone to send his money to any cryptocurrency address or any banking account number. Nobody should make you do this.

Remember to never install any application allowing remote connection to your connecting device. We don’t do that and if somebody tries to trick you into doing so, they are most likely scammers.

Don’t trust scammers reaching out to you

One of the typical schemes currently used is actually making all cryptocurrencies look bad. When you can read from time to time that somebody invested in crypto and was robbed you can start to feel that all of this is just a scam. A lot of fake brokers try to convince people around the globe that they will invest your money if you send it to them. Sometimes they would start by showing you profit on your personal account to lure you to send them more funds.

Showing this fast rise they will often suggest further investments. Problems start when you ask that person to sell the supposed cryptocurrencies you own. Criminal then will break communication and disappear with your money. Even going to the police with that often ends with just losing all since most of the money you paid gets split between people with stolen IDs.

The methods used by criminals could be different – unexpected technical support, police wanting money for a fine. The result is the same, they want to get your money.

So if you are an active trader keep in mind some good security practices concerning crypto.

Best cybersecurity practices you can follow

Make your password unique and long. How to make a good password? How about learning from the best?

Source: How to make a good password and why it’s hard to crack

Of course, don’t use “correct horse battery staple” but make the password easy for you to remember and hard to guess like four or five songs that have a lot of meaning to your reader.

Use a password manager for harder passwords – there are free and paid ones so you can choose what suits you the most. Thanks to that kind of app you only need to remember one master password.

Don’t be afraid of using 2FA on all sites. Use a virtual one on your phone or a physical key that needs to be put in your USB or connected by BT. It’s very less likely that someone will get your password and your phone as well so they can log in to your account.

On your Mac or PC remember to cipher your hard drive. So even when someone would steal your whole machine – your account can still be safe so will be the cold wallet if you use one.

Use safe connections. If you’re not certain that WiFi in a hotel is secure, connect to crucial services using a mobile network from your own hotspot. It’s much more secure than a lot of free access hotspots.

To an extent – use a VPN – it’s always harder for network owners to see where you are connecting even if the data is secure on our site, some of your transfers can still be seen as passing by internet devices.

Use devises you are certain of. If you connect on a PC that many different users can use, expect it to be a “virus liar”. Use a clean device and keep it updated, as well as software on it – mostly browsers but not only.

Consider using an antivirus. Even if you believe Microsoft Defender for a PC is enough, look at the same matter again. It’s an antivirus everyone has. So the hackers. It means they can easily prepare scripts and bad software that can bypass that kind of security measure. Buying any AV software means additional costs for them or they need to upload their software to services like Virustotal where data is later shared with AV engine creators so they can faster react and block trojans etc. on their AV.

When connecting to our services feel free to check our certificate. It should be valid in the current period and valid for the simplefx.com website. It’s not just a green padlock that matters. But also who is the signer. So be aware that we don’t use certs generated by “Let’s encrypt” – even if we like the idea for the greater good of ciphering data over the internet.

Keep your crypto off the public exchanges

Don’t keep your cryptocurrencies on trade markets all the time. Use a wallet. Transfer the money when you want to make a trade or just keep a part of your wallet on the market. Even if we try our best at maintaining our infrastructure we can never be certain if there are zero bugs in all that we create. That’s why we keep our bug bounty program to make our business more transparent and better with help from users. Bugs leading to money leaks happened before on other markets so better be aware than sorry.

Consider using cold wallets to store your money locally on your device. Hot and cold wallets are digital but when a hacker gets access to your hot wallet you can’t get a refund like in a traditional bank. You need to be extra cautious and a way of helping with that is a cold wallet. To perform an operation it needs your private key to be accessible (again a generated signing key or a physical one). There are some free and paid options for keeping your wallet so look around (use YT to look for some comparisons) and use what suits you best.

So to sum all up – security can never be a certain thing and the best option to keep it is adding layers upon layers to make it harder to pass for unethical hackers or bots.