Bitcoin is well known for its safety. The biggest dangers are mainly hacker attacks on third party services, through which one accesses his bitcoins. These are above all the various crypto exchanges on which the users have created accounts or the bitcoins stored locally in wallets.
Basically, either the exchange itself is directly attacked, so that data can be stolen there. The biggest known incident was the hacker attack on Mt.Gox about 4 years ago, when a huge hack of Bitcoins was looted. This was also the reason for the decrease of Bitcoins 2014.
Today, the exchanges have improved to prevent such occurrences, because it can come to hacks and the trade is severely restricted or even stopped completely. This often leads to strong price fluctuations, mainly caused by so-called panic sells.
An equally large attack surface offer individual mistakes that can easily be prevented. Individual mistakes are the responsibility of individual users and are often:
- insufficiently secured user accounts due to weak passwords
- Login on a phishing site
- send the private keys to a scammer
If a stranger has once gained access to your own accounts, he can quickly transfer the entire balance to another wallet and due to the anonymity, it is no longer clearly comprehensible. For such a kind of total loss helps therefore only a careful handling with your personal user data.
But as long as you follow to the usual security rules and pay attention to secure passwords, which you should also change from time to time and do not use the same password on many other pages, an accident normally cannot happen.
The high demand and high competition between exchanges has also contributed to the improvement of safety standards.
How make you sure to safe your Bitcoins?
All of you have mentioned is noteworthy and shall be taken care of by everyone. Not everyone adopt proper safety measures in the bitcoin community that is why people tend to loose their holdings. These safety measures should be adopted irrespective of howsoever secure your wallet is or howsoever negligible the amount of your holding. But the problem is with the hackers. WHat can be done in case your account is being hacked or anything of that sort?!?
I don't know if there could be anything to be done if the account is hacked. I'm curious if there are some measures, maybe someone knows a trick. Exchanges have improved a lot and things like cold wallet storage are the right way, but it's still a third party wallet.
I think it's only possible to prevent hacks as good as possible, the best thing is to prevent mistakes by ourself, it's the most dangerous one. By using security measures like 2fa, a strong password and check not to login at a phishing site we can improve it in a good way.
After all I would recommend not to store high values at exchange wallets because your funds are "on the exchange" because you don't own the private key of your address...
