Category: Cybersecurity

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

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Coinmama security

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…

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Vulnerability Is Found in Constantinople

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Constantinople Hard Fork Postponed

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…

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Cryptopia goes offline after hack

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Cryptopia

A New Zealand-based crypto-currency trading company went offline after it was hacked at the weekend. Cryptopia, based in Christchurch, announced on Twitter that on January 14, it suffered a security breach that resulted in significant losses. “Once identified, the exchange was put into maintenance while we assessed damages,” it added. The exchange has not disclosed the value of the losses, the tokens and currencies affected or any measures to refund users. But Whale Alert, which tracks large crypto transactions, reported that 19,391 ether (ETH) tokens worth nearly $2.44 million, and…

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Two Thirds of Korean Crypto Exchanges Fail Government Security Check

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crypto fail

Only a third of cryptocurrency exchanges inspected got a full pass in a recent government security audit. The Ministry of Science and ICT, the Korea Internet & Security Agency and the Ministry of Economy and Finance inspected a total of 21 crypto exchanges from September to December 2018, examining 85 different security aspects. Notably, only 7 of them – Upbit, Bithumb, Gopax, Korbit, Coinone, Hanbitco, and Huobi Korea – cleared all the tests, CoinDesk Korea reported Thursday. The remaining 14 exchanges are “vulnerable to hacking attacks at all times because…

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Coinbase suspended Ethereum Classic (ETC) trading after a successful 51% attack

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Ethereum Classic attack

The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase suspended the trading of Ethereum Classic (ETC) after double-spend attacks worth $1.1 Million. The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has suspended the trading of Ethereum Classic (ETC) after double-spend attacks that consist in spending digital coins twice. Ethereum Classic (ETC) is the original unforked Ethereum blockchain, the attacks resulted in the loss of $1.1 million worth of the digital currency. 51% attack refers to an attack on a blockchain by a group of miners that controls over 50% of the network’s mining hashrate. “On 1/5/2019, Coinbase detected a…

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Vulnerability on Ethereum enables malicious GAS Minting

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GasToken

A newly discovered vulnerability on Ethereum allowing for malicious GasToken Minting was found. The development team already acknowledged the issue and informed most of the affected users on November 13, 2018, via private disclosure. The Attack Crypto exchanges usually allow the withdrawal of Ethereum to arbitrary addresses with no gas usage limit; since this executes a fall back function, attackers can use this to make exchanges pay for arbitrary computation, allowing them to force exchanges to burn their own Ethereum on high transaction costs. Moreover, this even gives attackers the…

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Crypto-miner steals your password and disables antivirus

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Linux.BtcMine.174

Malware targeting Linux users may not be as widespread as the strains targeting the Windows ecosystem, but Linux malware is becoming just as complex and multi-functional as time passes by. The latest example of this trend is a new trojan discovered this month by Russian antivirus maker Dr.Web. This new malware strain doesn’t have a distinctive name, yet, being only tracked under its generic detection name of Linux.BtcMine.174. But despite the generic name, the trojan is a little bit more complex than most Linux malware, mainly because of the plethora…

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Google hacked to promote Bitcoin scam on Twitter

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Google hacked

In the latest in a string of cryptocurrency-related hackings on Twitter, attackers have breached an official Google account to promote a Bitcoin giveaway scam to its over 800,000 followers. The official G Suite Twitter account just blasted the following message to hundreds of thousands of users: Hard Fork has yet to confirm for how long the tweet remained on G Suite’s feed, but it was no less than 11 minutes (as you can notie on the screenshot. (Update 19:52 UTC, November 13: Ernst Mulders, who provided the screenshot above, told…

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Swiss report shows trojan malware attacking crypto exchanges

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Trojan Dridex malware

A Swiss report has unearthed that a virus that mines Monero is responsible for one of the largest attacks on the Swiss crypto industry this year. Trojan malware that was once used for hacking into large-scale banks is now being used to attack crypto-asset exchanges. Swiss Researchers Uncover Cybersecurity Threat The news of the computer virus attacking Swiss crypto exchanges comes from Switzerland’s Reporting and Analysis Centre for Information Assurance (MELANI). Malware has long been used by cyber-criminals to break into major banking systems but has now evolved to attack…

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Security system for IoT

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OAS Blockchain Renaissance Project

The Dubai Silicon Oasis-based firm, Next Big Idea Technology (NBIT), a group of Harvard-graduate blockchain professionals, is all set to develop and launch the state-of-the-art security system for IoT and blockchain with plans to reach the global market through the Middle East and Africa as its starting point. Sang Soo Lee, the CEO of NBIT said, his firm, on the basis of US and Korean technology, has come up with an OAS Blockchain Renaissance Project that blockchain technology applies beyond cryptocurrency. He said, “It is unfortunate that the general population…

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