Category: Cybersecurity

A Russian court has levied an official ban against messaging app Telegram, just weeks after its initial coin offering (ICO) presale raised nearly $2 billion in two private funding rounds. Tagansky court judge Yuliya Smolina ruled against Telegram on Friday, siding with communications regulator Roskomnadzor’s request for the authorization to block access to the app on the grounds that the company had refused to comply with local laws. Intelligence officials with the FSB Federal Security service had repeatedly demanded that Telegram hand over its encryption keys, which would have allowed…

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Android crypto-miners have seen a staggering 4000% increase in the first three months of 2018. To put things in perspective, the total consumer detections have reached 16 million as of the end of March, according to a report issued by Malwarebytes. It seems that last year’s cryptojacking sentiment is still running with full force, as consumer crypto-miners soar 4000% in just the first three months of 2018. Info Security cites Malwarebytes, pointing out the massive increase in Android crypto-miners. Malwarebytes’ Cybercrime Tactics and Techniques report for the first three months…

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A cryptocurrency mining gang is using a function normally found in SLocker Android ransomware to add self-protection and persistence to what Trend Micros is calling HiddenMiner. HiddenMiner abuses the Device Administrator feature, as does SLocker, to remain hidden and active and does this so well it has the ability to either use the device’s resources until it runs out of power or fails due to overheating. And HiddenMiner ensures that it retains its administrative privilege by locking the screen’s device, using a flaw inherent in Android operating systems 7.0 and…

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Sweden has seen a surge of cryptojacking attacks, with a growth of 10,000 percent in the last quarter of 2017. This is twice the global growth rate for the same period, and more than the price of bitcoin managed in the whole year! Cybersecurity threats are a growing global concern, and rapid developments in cryptocurrency have made this type of hacking the most lucrative. The increase in cryptojacking correlates with a decline in ransomware, suggesting thieves are moving with the tide as digital currency establishes itself. Instead of stealing your…

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Over 5,000 websites across the UK and Australia, including government sites, were cryptojacked to force visitors’ computers to mine cryptocurrency. More than 5,000 websites, including government portals in the UK and Australia, fell victim to malware that forces the computers of visitors to unsuspectingly mine cryptocurrency, various media reported. The massive cryptojacking was discovered on Sunday, when UK security researcher Scott Helme was notified by a friend. The latter’s anti-virus program raised the alert about a piece of malware after a visit to the website of the UK Information Commissioner’s…

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Online scammers have made over $5,000 worth of Ethereum in one night alone, showing how gullible some cryptocurrency users can be. Miscreants achieved this by creating fake Twitter profiles for real-world celebrities and spamming the social network with messages tricking users to participate in “giveaways.” Crooks deceived users into sending a small amount of Ethereum, promising they would receive the sum ten times over as part of the giveaway. All the messages followed the same pattern, even if the sums and Ethereum wallet addresses varied between the fake Twitter accounts.…

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Potential Seele ICO investors were recently scammed out of nearly $2 million by impersonators posing as admins, who used the company’s Telegram channel to get them to send their money over before the token sale began. Seele, a blockchain project that describes itself as “blockchain 4.0,” with potential applications in IoT, game assets, fintech, and others, has a technical blurb on its homepage that claims Seele is “powered by an up-scalable Neural Consensus protocol for high throughput concurrency among large scale heterogeneous nodes and is able to form a unique…

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When the Bee Token ICO kicked off on Wednesday, thousands of investors rushed to fund “Beenest,” a commission-free home-sharing platform that aims to disrupt industry heavyweights Airbnb and VRBO. Unfortunately, hundreds of them unwittingly fell prey to an email- and Telegram-based phishing scam targeted at prospective Bee Token ICO contributors. Bee Token has spent the bulk of the past two days warning its ICO contributors about the scams, advising them to ignore direct communications that claim to be from the company and verify the token sale’s contract address on the…

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2017 was the year of high profile data breaches and ransomware attacks, but from the beginning of this year, we are noticing a faster-paced shift in the cyber threat landscape, as cryptocurrency-related malware is becoming a popular and profitable choice of cyber criminals. Several cybersecurity firms are reporting of new cryptocurrency mining viruses that are being spread using EternalBlue—the same NSA exploit that was leaked by the hacking group Shadow Brokers and responsible for the devastating widespread ransomware threat WannaCry. Researchers from Proofpoint discovered a massive global botnet dubbed “Smominru,”…

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The ads largely arrived on Wednesday and ended up stealing the computing power from victims’ PCs through their browsers. This week, ads over YouTube carried a sneaky surprise: a cryptocurrency miner. The mining software briefly invaded the video platform in an attempt to secretly siphon the computing power from any YouTube viewers who encountered the ads. The culprit? Hackers who decided to abuse Google’s ad network. The bad actors seeded the advertisements with web scripts that’ll run over your browser to mine the digital currency Monero. The ads largely arrived on…

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A new report from researchers at Sucuri reveals that websites are once again being found infected by cryptomining code – stealing the resources of visiting computers to mine for the Monero cryptocurrency. Many web surfers almost certainly don’t realise that the reason that their laptop’s fan is running at full blast is because the website they are viewing is tied up with the complex number-crunching necessary to earn the digital currency. But, in a twist, this particular attack isn’t just interested in mining Monero. While the website’s front-end is digging…

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According to major Japanese cryptocurrency exchange CoinCheck executives, more than $530 million worth of NEM has been stolen from the trading platform. MineCC, a Japan-based cryptocurrency analyst, reported that during an official public conference, CoinCheck executives admitted that all funds stored in its hot wallet were stolen by an unknown group of hackers. Unlike cold wallets, which are secure and kept offline, hot wallets can be accessed if servers are breached by hackers. As such, the majority of large-scale cryptocurrency exchange in the industry only store a small portion of…

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As cryptocurrency craze does not seem to let go of markets, scamsters also take an opportunity to dupe some investors and make illegal profits. In one of such latest cases, a fake MyEtherWallet app on Android has been spotted by the industry participants. These days, people are all about mobility – it seems very convenient to download an app on your smartphone and do the things on the go. However, this can lead to quite unpleasant results. This time, a fake MyEtherWallet app has tried to mislead investors on Google…

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The IOTA community suffered a major setback over the weekend as several users lost an estimated total of $4 million worth of tokens in a widespread theft. Over the weekend, several IOTA users had their wallets compromised, and consequently emptied, as unknown actors loaded with seed phrases decided to make off with almost $4 million worth of the digital currency. According to a Medium post by IOTA evangelist Ralf Rottman: “On January 19th, 2018, some IOTA users lost their funds to an unknown attacker. The good news: The IOTA technology…

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