According to the team behind the Ronin Network, the attack was socially engineered. In other words, the hacker targeted employees via emails or phishing websites, to gain access to the system.
“It was pure human error,” Amber Ghaddar, founder of decentralized finance firm AllianceBlock, told Insider, adding that social engineering is one of the most common drivers of cybercrimes.
“If consumers aren’t protected from things like this, the industry is going to fail,” she added.
Hackers will keep using social engineering until it stops being effective, but this isn’t a reason to be skeptical of cryptocurrency as technology, said Redbord.
“Attacks like this are concerning, but I believe in the promise of crypto,” Redbord said. “We need to focus on building out a trust layer in the crypto economy — anti-money laundering infrastructure, compliance controls, cybersecurity — so that people will interact with this new online financial system.
