Anna Collard, SVP Content Strategy and Evangelist, KnowBe4 Africa
In its simplest form, Web3 stands for a new and more egalitarian version of the internet – one that is built on blockchain-based infrastructure and where cryptocurrencies, tokens and NFTs are built into the platforms maintained by the nodes of a peer-to-peer network. A more complicated way to think about Web3 is an internet that is decentralised and owned by the users, instead of controlled by a few companies. Critics say this is technically not possible to achieve and also not necessarily in the interest of the mainstream users. Centralisation happens organically in all eco-systems and for good reasons: to simplify, to improve efficiency, to bring down costs, to connect or to provide a level of control. And let’s face it, not every person will be keen on writing their own code, distributed apps (dApps) or hosting their own nodes.
A key component in the growth of Web3 has been DeFi or decentralised finance, which is Web3’s version of a more transparent financial system. It provides financial instruments such as decentralised exchanges, payments, investing, lending, borrowing and staking solutions.
The innovation in Web3 and Defi offer great opportunities to both new and traditional financial institutions alike, however, they also bring with it a number of cyber risks and scams.
For consumers, there is the risk of falling for typical social engineering attacks such as phishing and fake investment scams. There is also specific malware that is written to target people who play in this space. For example, the Clipper malware targets cryptocurrency wallet addresses during a transaction. A wallet address is like the cryptocurrency version of a bank account number. And when the affected user applies copy paste, Clipper replaces this address with the address of the attacker.
Another major risk to consider is that distributed apps and smart contracts are code that is written by people…
