Interview with Nik Patel

By Panama Crypto

1. What/who/how brought you to the $CRYPTO sphere aside the profitability?

Dogecoin. I stumbled across it on Reddit and thus began my journey into this space.

2. What are your interests/hobbies outside $CRYPTO?

Writing, reading, pubs and David Attenborough documentaries.

3. Could you elaborate what happened to you on Tuesday?

I was hacked via a remote access Trojan, that gained access to my PC after somehow bypassing my antivirus. This cleared out my local wallets whilst my PC was staking coins overnight. I made the rookie mistake of leaving a copy of my Bittrex 2FA on my PC somewhere, which the hacker evidently also found, because I woke up to an empty Bittrex account too. I never leave backup codes on my PC yet this one slipped by me — I must have copied it down intending to write it down and never did. Regardless, the rookie mistake made a bad situation even worse.

4. How could you have prevented this from happening?

I’m not sure about preventing the remote access Trojan since I have antivirus and a strong firewall etc but I will not be downloading wallets from new coins. As for the Bittrex hack, I just shouldn’t have left a backup 2FA code on my PC.

5. What would be the best $CRYPTO security advice you could give?

Use different email accounts for each exchange, and use a U2F key for those email accounts. Whitelist IP addresses and withdrawal addresses. Don’t download new wallets that seem sketchy just to mine launches. Use a password manager. Don’t use Windows.