Blockchain
Cryptocurrencies now have a “neighborhood watch” to protect against hacker attacks
The cryptocurrency industry, for years plagued by hacks and other wrongdoing, has a new group dedicated to cleaning things up, led by cybersecurity veteran Justine Bone.
The full list of Crypto ISAC founding members, who provide financial support to the organization, will be revealed on stage on May 29 at CoinDesk Consensus 2024 in Austin, Texas. Included in the list are two of the largest exchanges, a major stablecoin issuer, one of the best-known custodian companies in the industry, as well as many other familiar names in the cryptocurrency industry.
“There hasn’t been a crypto ISAC until now, and some people are surprised when they find out about it,” Bone said in an interview with CoinDesk. “So, a few years ago, some cybersecurity companies, joined by other major figures in the cryptocurrency industry, recognized this gap and started to organize themselves.”
From $1.7 billion was lost to crypto platform hackers in 2023, according to blockchain investigation firm Chainalysis.
ISACs were introduced as non-profit organizations in the late 1990s to facilitate and legitimize the sharing of information on cybersecurity vulnerabilities and incidents between public sector and private sector organizations. They are often compared to neighborhood watch programs.
The unveiling of Crypto ISAC, several years in the making, is something of a badge of honor, uniting the cryptocurrency industry with many other established verticals that use information sharing to protect critical infrastructure, such as healthcare healthcare, retail, financial sector, automotive industry and many others.
Bone describes an ISAC as “a trusted intermediary who sits in the middle of the conversation about security issues.” Typically these issues could be a warning about a new vulnerability in a type of technology or an ongoing active incident, where professionals need to engage and collaborate to resolve the issue, she said.
Bone has been a longtime member of the Blackhat Review Board, the internationally recognized cybersecurity event series and provider of security research. He has also served as an information security officer at Dow Jones and Bloomberg, has advised several Fortune 50 companies and continues to serve on the advisory board of technology giant HP.
Crypto ISAC organizers range from “crypto-native companies up to investors, government officials and cybersecurity solution providers specializing in cryptocurrencies and Web3,” Bone said.
The information-sharing protocol underlying the platform is carefully vetted and already adopted by most other ISACs, he said. In addition to having the necessary cybersecurity certificates, you stated that the Crypto ISAC will be “FedRAMP-ready,” an important designation that qualifies an organization to provide services to the U.S. government.
“We’ll be setting up this platform in the next couple of weeks, so when we launch at Consensus, our members will actually have a platform that they can log in and see this threat intelligence,” Bone said.