It’s every exchange’s worst nightmare: Falling victim to a security breach. An incident can disrupt a trading platform’s operations for weeks, affect customer confidence and damage a carefully cultivated reputation — even causing crypto markets to fall in some cases.

Crypto companies have been ramping up their security measures in recent years, determined to ensure that malicious actors don’t get an opportunity to infiltrate their systems. This has prompted hackers, scammers and fraudsters to rely on more sophisticated techniques.

One crucial weapon has emerged that helps trading platforms take speedy action in the event that their infrastructure is compromised: Analytics software. But how do these companies go about their investigations whenever a breach is reported? What are the tools that can be relied upon to follow a thief’s tracks?

Hunting the hackers

The first step is to identify a criminal’s crypto address as soon as possible. This information can then be passed on to analytics software companies, which can immediately tag the address as high risk. Doing this quickly can ensure that the entity is easier to track. There can be times when there’s little information about an address hash, but this doesn’t mean that there’s a dead end. That’s because transaction and date filtering can be used instead.

Next, it’s a race against time to start tracking bad actors who may begin to obfuscate the funds that they have misappropriated. They may start sending transactions to other exchanges or use mixing services and darknet entities. Although this commonly happens immediately after crypto has been taken, it can sometimes take months or years for obfuscation to commence — when a criminal may think no one is looking. Analytics providers can offer transaction alerts to ensure that victims can be immediately notified when funds flow to or from an address.

These transaction alerts need to be acted upon as a matter of urgency, as work begins to follow the trail. A crucial step involves notifying exchanges that might end up receiving some of this crypto to ensure they are able to block stolen funds that flow into their accounts. Visualization tools can play a role in illustrating how misappropriated assets are distributed — and show the addresses that may be directly or indirectly connected to the criminal.