Cybersecurity | CRYPTO WORLD NETWORK NEWS

More than half of all crypto exchanges have weak or no ID verification

October 6, 2020October 3, 2020 CRYPTO WORLD

The highest number of exchanges defying regulatory norms are in Europe. More than half of all exchanges worldwide have weak KYC identification protocols — with exchanges in Europe, the U.S. and U.K. among the worst offenders, according to a new study by blockchain analysis firm CipherTrace CipherTrace analyzed more than 800 decentralized, centralized, and automated market maker exchanges and found 56% of them did not follow KYC guidelines at all despite anti-money laundering (AML) regulations. The highest number of such exchanges are in Europe — a region renowned for stricter…

DoJ Aims to Seize 280 Cryptocurrency Accounts Used by Hackers

August 29, 2020 CRYPTO WORLD

Complaint details collaboration with China to funnel $250m in stolen funds as part of state-sponsored attacks. The U.S. government aims to seize control of 280 illegal cryptocurrency accounts it claims were used by North Korean state-sponsored attackers in their efforts to hack cryptocurrency exchanges and funnel hundreds of millions in stolen funds through a Chinese money-laundering network. The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) filed a civil forfeiture complaint against North Korea Thursday as part of a broader effort to shut down that it said were state-sponsored cyberattacks on currency exchanges…

Russia’s New Crypto Analytics System to Track Dash and Monero

August 13, 2020August 11, 2020 CRYPTO WORLD

Dubbed “Transparent Blockchain,” Russia’s new crypto analytics system is designed to fight illicit activity related to crypto. A major financial watchdog in Russia is developing a new cryptocurrency analytics tool to trace major cryptos like Bitcoin (BTC) and privacy coins. Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service, a federal service combating money laundering and terrorist financing, is reportedly planning to build a new analytics platform for tracking cryptocurrency transactions via artificial intelligence. Dubbed “Transparent Blockchain,” the new system is designed to track the movement of digital financial assets and identify crypto service…

Crypto Wallet Maker Ledger Loses 1M Email Addresses in Data Theft

July 30, 2020July 30, 2020 CRYPTO WORLD

Ledger said customer details have been stolen in a data breach that may well have been exploited for over two months. In a note to clients Wednesday, CEO Pascal Gauthier said the French hardware wallet provider fell victim to a large-scale data breach from an unauthorized third party. The hacker, whose identity remains unknown, gained access to Ledger’s e-commerce and marketing database. Customers affected include those who signed up for Ledger’s newsletter or to receive promotional material. Information stolen included email addresses, with a smaller “subset” of 9,500 customers also…

Twitter hacked in Bitcoin scam

July 16, 2020July 16, 2020 CRYPTO WORLD

Twitter was hacked yesterday when Bitcoin scammers sent a series of tweets from the official accounts of Apple, Uber, Joe Biden, Elon Musk and hundreds of others, reaping more than $100,000 (£79,500, €87,750). The platform said that some of its employees had been targeted by a social engineering campaign, allowing hackers to gain access to its internal systems. The severity of the incident is still being investigated. Appearing across multiple high-profile accounts in a matter of minutes, various tweets promised users that the account holders would double donations from anyone…

BitMEX’s downtime on 13 March prompted by DDoS attack, not ‘hardware issues’

March 17, 2020March 17, 2020 CRYPTO WORLD

BitMEX’s Chief Technology Officer [CTO], Samuel Reed, had provided a gist of the attack that hit the exchange platform on 13 March. Now, BitMEX’s Chief Executive Officer [CEO], Arthur Hayes, has come out to update the community with more info, stating that the BitMEX team will be addressing the issue soon. He elaborated on the same in a blog post, one that expanded on the two DDoS attacks that took place on 13 March. The CTO had previously noted that the exchange was under a botnet attack, the same it…

OKEx and Bitfinex Suffer a DDoS Attack

March 2, 2020February 29, 2020 CRYPTO WORLD

In what’s turning into a series of crypto exchanges with issues this month, Bitfinex and OKEx have both reported a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Just this morning (UTC time), Bitfinex took to Twitter to notify the user that they are investigating what seems to be a DDoS, sharing a status page for further updates on the matter. A DDoS attack is used to flood a website from many different sources in order to disrupt the service and make it unavailable. It’s like intentionally crowding a shop from all sides, not…

Penalty for mining BTC on nuclear research center supercomputer

September 29, 2019September 29, 2019 CRYPTO WORLD

An employee at a nuclear research center in the closed town of Sarov in Russia was fined for illegally mining Bitcoin (BTC). Convicted to pay $7,000 fine According to a Sept. 27 article by Russian news outlet Meduza, a man was fined 450,000 rubles ($7,000) for trying to mine Bitcoin by using a petaflop-capable supercomputer at his workplace, the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute in Sarov, Russia. Sarov, about 230 miles east of Moscow is a closed town as it is the Russian center for nuclear weapons research. The court delivered…

Exit scams swindled $3.1 billion from crypto investors in 2019

August 13, 2019August 13, 2019 CRYPTO WORLD

Cryptocurrency crime made good money last quarter, although less than in the first quarter of 2019. According to an initial release of CipherTrace’s Q2 2019 Cryptocurrency Anti-Money Laundering Report to CoinDesk, aggregate crypto losses reached $4.3 billion this year. Hacking thefts amounted to $125 million, adding to a 2019 total of $227 million. Excluding the QuadrigaCX hacking of $195 million, hackers stole $161 million in Q1. Given that CipherTrace’s price estimations are set at the time of initial reporting, current valuations would be much higher. CipherTrace further claims 2019 may…

Major Web Browser Firefox by Mozilla Now Blocks Web-Based Cryptojacking

April 12, 2019April 11, 2019 CRYPTO WORLD

Protections Against Fingerprinting and Cryptocurrency Mining

Major open-source browser Mozilla Firefox has launched new protections against crypto mining malware in its new browser versions, according to a blog post published on April 9. In its latest Firefox Nightly 68 and Beta 67 versions, Mozilla has enabled a new level of protection against crypto mining and fingerprinting hack attacks in a part of the browser’s Content Blocking suite of protections. The new browsing feature has been developed in collaboration with privacy and security software firm Disconnect, and represents a collection of blacklists of malware domains associated with…

New York rejects Bittrex Bitlicense application

April 11, 2019April 11, 2019 CRYPTO WORLD

According to the press, the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) decided to reject the BitLicense application from the Bittrex exchange. According to the New York Tax Office’s official report sent to Bittrex CEO Bill Shihare, New York, Bittrex Bitlicense rejects the lack of stock exchange policies and controls against AML, Know Your Customer (KYC), and Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) ). Bittrex ranked 54th in the CoinMarketCap list of digital currency exchanges in terms of adjusted trading volume. The Bittrex case in brief BitLicense is a set…

Google Deletes Crypto Malware Targeting Blockchain.com

March 18, 2019March 16, 2019 CRYPTO WORLD

A Google Chrome browser extension tricking users into participating in a fake airdrop from cryptocurrency exchange Huobi claimed over 200 victims, a security researcher reported in a blog post on March 14. The extension for Chrome web browser, with the name NoCoin, gained 230 downloads before Google deleted it, according to Harry Denley, who runs cryptocurrency scam database EtherscamDB. Denley noted that hackers had purposely disguised the malicious extension to look like a tool protecting users from cryptocurrency malware or so-called cryptojacking. “From the start, it looked like it did…

Major crypto brokerage Coinmama reports 450,000 users affected by data breach

February 16, 2019February 18, 2019 CRYPTO WORLD

Israel-based crypto brokerage Coinmama — which allows users to purchase Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) using a credit card — has suffered a major data breach affecting 450,000 of its users. The incident was disclosed in an official company announcement on Feb. 15. The breach is reportedly part of a mammoth, multi-platform hack that affected 24 companies and a total of 747 million records — among them gaming, travel booking and streaming sites. Coinmama says a list of around “450,000 email addresses and hashed passwords” of users who registered on…

Vulnerability Is Found in Constantinople

January 16, 2019February 7, 2019 CRYPTO WORLD

Ethereum’s (ETH) Constantinople hard fork faces a delay over a newly discovered security vulnerability allowing a reentrancy attack. The critical issue was detected by smart contract audit firm ChainSecurity and reported in a blog post Jan. 15. According to the company’s report, the Constantinople upgrade introduces cheaper gas cost (transaction fees) for some operations on the Ethereum network. As an unexpected side effect, this allegedly enables reentrancy attacks via the use of certain commands in ETH smart contracts. A reentrancy vulnerability allows a potential attacker to steal cryptocurrency from a…