The Bitcoin rate added more than $3 500 in yesterday’s trading, showing the maximum one-day gain this year, exceeding the size of the fall of “Black Thursday” on March 12th. The cryptocurrency price has risen 15% above long-term three-year highs, which violates the market principles. Financial instruments usually do not pass such important levels at one time without a corrective movement.
Strong growth of Bitcoin after the breakdown of $20 000 could have been provoked by a successful hacker attack on the American company “SolarWinds”.
The hack happened several months ago, when the attackers managed to inject malicious code into the upcoming program update. SolarWinds serves the US government and a large proportion of the international IT sector, which has been at the mercy of hackers with access to a wide range of information and the ability to spy.
The malicious code was discovered on December 13, but the true scale of the hack began to emerge on December 17, when the US Security Council was urgently called.
Hackers managed to get access to the SEC regulator’s databases, which store secret, insider information on the largest future transactions and report details. The attackers read the official correspondence of the US Treasury and Treasury on investigations, sanctions plans, etc.
According to the American National Security Agency, the degree of penetration of hackers into state information systems was such that they could cause a collapse of the financial system. The government and civil services were forced to turn off the SolarWinds Orion software for a day.
Hacking went down in history as Sunburst. Damage assessment will require years of research, but in the meantime, hackers will use the received financial and confidential information for blackmail, threats, fraud, insider trading on the stock exchange, etc.
The Sunburst case once again underlines the reliability of the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain, which do not depend on the human factor and the governments of individual states, safely storing financial and personal information.