Google Chrome Comes Up With A Cure To Flag Scamming ICOs

Google Chrome has come up with a new extension to allay fears of crypto investors, which can help detect possible scams and give investors an additional layer of security against the rising number of cybercrimes plaguing the crypto world these days. The last year has seen cybercrimes related to crypto triple and one of the key targets of the swindlers has been the ICO space. A very large section of initial coin offerings (ICOs) have turned out to be false, even though investors are often lured in by genuine-looking sites.

The Sentinel Protocol’s Uppward Chrome Extension has been developed by the Uppsala Foundation from Singapore. The new launch has been dubbed the “Search Engine for Secure Investing in ICOs” and plans to alert potential investors about phishing sites in the guise of genuine ICOs and also make use of a blockchain-based database to mark wallet addresses that arouse suspicion. Uppward has crowdsourced threat information from the Sentinel Protocol’s Decentralized Threat Reputation Database so that the investors can be secured a little better.

The mastermind behind the protocol is Patrick Kim, who had found the Uppsala Foundation and came up with the idea after being robbed of roughly $2 million worth of Ether due to a wallet security breach.

The Uppward browser is far from being the only crusader against the ever-increasing cybersecurity concerns. The US Securities and Exchange Commission or the SEC is also doing its bit to make potential investors aware of the risks that infest this otherwise profitable space. To drive home the point they were making, the SEC even created a fake ICO site with signs of scam all over, especially promises of unrealistic returns on investments. In the light of alarming reports by a Satis Group study that 80% of ICOs in a year had been found to be scams, and with Kaspersky Labs also revealing equally alarming pieces of data about the cracks in the cybersecurity system, the SEC’s response can be said to completely justified.