Bitcoin | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Till now we all have heard about the Ransomware malware that encrypts your files or lock down your computer and ask for a ransom amount to be paid in a specified duration of time to unlock it. Emsisoft has detected a new piece of malware called " Linkup ", dubbed as " Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Linkup " that doesn't lock your computer or encrypts files; rather it blocks your Internet access by modifying the DNS settings, with the ability to turn your computer into a Bitcoin mining robot.  Sounds Interesting?? Once the Linkup Trojan is installed in your system, it makes a copy of itself and disables the selected Windows Security and Firewall services to facilitate the infection. Injected poisoned DNS Server will only allow the malware and Bitcoin miner to communicate with the internet. It display a bogus notification on the victim's web browser, which is supposed to be from the Council of Europe , that accuses you of viewing " Child Pornography " and only returns th

Last year in the month of December the Security-focused Unix-like distribution ' OpenBSD ' Foundation announced that it was facing shut down due to lack of funds to pay their electricity bills and dedicated Internet line costs. Theo de Raadt , the founder of the OpenBSD project, and Bob Beck (Developer) announced : " In light of shrinking funding, we do need to look for a source to cover project expenses. If need be the OpenBSD Foundation can be involved in receiving donations to cover project electrical costs. But the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on. " Just after a month, a Bitcoin billionaire from Romania has stepped in and sorted OpenBSD out! Mircea Popescu , the creator of the MPEx Bitcoin stock exchange has offered $20,000 donations to the OpenBSD Foundation and saved the existence of OpenBSD development from being stopped. Like each open source project, OpenBSD production servers we

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

In last October, the Feds told they would probably just  liquidate the bitcoins  seized from the online black market Silk Road, once they were legally free to do so. Finally the United States District Judge  J. Paul Oetken   signed off  on the forfeiture order for the Bitcoins, clearing the government to sell the assets. Last September, the FBI had seized  29,655 Bitcoins from the online black market Silk Road after its alleged 29-year-old mastermind, Ross William Ulbricht , aka ' Dread Pirate Roberts ' was arrested and charged with possessing controlled substances and committing or conspiring to commit computer hacking offenses, among other charges. This new ruling represents the largest-ever forfeiture of Bitcoins . The assets include the Silk Road hidden website and 29,655 Bitcoins , worth more than $28 Million according to current exchange rates. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said: "With today's forfeiture of $28 million worth of Bitcoins fr

Like Bitcoin, There are numerous other cryptocurrency similar in nature, including  MasterCoin , ProtoShares, Litecoin, Peercoin, BitBar and many more. One of them is  Primecoin  (sign: Ψ; code: XPM),  a peer-to-peer open source cryptocurrency that implements a scientific computing proof-of-work system. Unlike Bitcoin or other virtual currencies, only Primecoin provides a proof of work that has intrinsic value. It generates a special form of prime number chains, known as ' Cunningham chains & bi-twin chains ' and has a real world importance in mathematical research. Worldwide famous RSA Encryption basically uses two prime numbers for generating a RSA key pair. If you are able to factorize the public key and find these prime numbers, you will then be able to find the private key. Thus, the whole Security of RSA encryption is based on the length of prime numbers. So, Primecoin plays a great role for crypto researchers to get large... and a very large number of Primes. Like

Ransomware is one of the most blatant and obvious criminal's money making schemes out there. Ransomware malware was mostly known by the people when Cryptolocker comes into play. At the time when readers were getting aware of ransomware, Cryptolocker threat had touched the peak and other money motivated cyber criminals have started developing their own Cryptolocker versions. Two hackers going by the name of ' gyx ' and ' Porphyry ' (admin of maldev.net hacking forum) are advertizing a new ramsomware malware tool-kit called "Prison Locker" on various hacking forums with tutorials. They have developed the Prison Locker a.k.a Power Locker ramsomware toolkit in C/C++ programming language, proving a GUI version with customizable features for customers. The Ransomware is using BlowFish encryption to encrypt all available files on the victim's hard disk and shared drives except . exe , . dll , . sys , other system files. During encryption it will ge

As the year draws to a close, we have seen the number of emerging threats like advance phishing attacks from the Syrian Electronic Army , financial malware and exploit kits, Cryptolocker ransomware infections, massive  Bitcoin theft, extensive privacy breach from NSA and many more. The financial malware's were the most popular threat this year. Money is always a perfect motivation for attackers and cyber criminals who are continually targeting financial institutions. On Tuesday, Antivirus firm Symantec has released a Threat report, called " The State of Financial Trojans: 2013 ", which revealed that over 1,400 financial institutions have been targeted and compromised millions of computers around the globe and the most targeted banks are in the US with 71.5% of all analyzed Trojans. Financial institutions have been fighting against malware for the last ten years to protect their customers and online transactions from threat. Over the time the attackers adapted to these counter

Data breaches and security incidents are a constant in the headlines these days. Hackers and cyber criminals   are motivated by status or money and finding new innovative and more creative attacks to achieve this. One of them are, Digital Bank robbery  - where the thieves didn't need masks and guns to pull off the job, all they need are - Hacking Skills, a computer and the Internet. Another way is  Cyber extortion  - threat of attack against an enterprise or a bank, coupled with a demand for money to avert or stop the attack. According to Haaretz news, A Hacker - who is the operator of a biggest botnet malware network in the Israel, has threatens 3 major Israeli banks, i.e. Israel Discount Bank, Bank Yahav and the First International Bank of Israel. " Bank received an e-mail message threatening that unless they handed over a certain sum in Bitcoins by the end of next week, a list of customers' details would be given to hostile elements. " Banks database, network an

World's largest Bitcoin poker website ' SealsWithClubs ' has been compromised and around 42,000 users' credentials are at risk. Seals With Club  has issued a  Mandatory Password Reset   warning to their users, according to a statement published on the website. The service admitted their database had been compromised and revealed that the data center used until November was breached, resulting 42,020 hashed password theft. " Passwords were salted and hashed per user, but to be safe every user MUST change their password when they next log in. Please do so at your earliest opportunity. If your Seals password was used for any other purpose you should reset those passwords too as a precaution. " and " Transfers may be disabled for a short period of time.". Seals With Clubs used SHA1 hash functions to encrypt the passwords, but SHA1 is outdated and easy to crack if not salted. ' StacyM ', a user then posted the hashed passwords on a web forum o

The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has arrested a gang of cyber criminals believed to be responsible for creating the Skynet Botnet. Skynet was first detected by Security Firm G DATA in December 2012. It is a variant of the famous Zeus malware to steal banking credentials with DDoS attack and Bitcoin mining capabilities. The Botnet was controlled from an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server hidden behind Tor network in order to evade sinkholing. According to a press release from German police, they arrested two people suspected of illegally generating Bitcoins worth nearly $1 million using a modified version of existing malware i.e. Skynet Botnet. German police conducted raids earlier this week on 3rd December and found evidence of other hacking activities i.e. Fraud and distribution of copyrighted pornographic material. A third person is under suspicion but has not been arrested. However, Police didn't mention Skynet Botnet in their press release, but just a day

Microsoft today announced that its Digital Crimes Unit ( a center of excellence for advancing the global fight against cybercrime ) has successfully disrupted the ZeroAccess botnet, one of the world's largest and most rampant botnet .The Botnet is " disrupted ," not "fully destroyed" , Microsoft itself admits that " do not expect to fully eliminate the ZeroAccess botnet due to the complexity of the threat. " This is the Microsoft's 8th botnet takedown operation in the past three years. With the help of U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation  ( FBI ) and Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), Microsoft led to the seizure of servers that had been distributing malware which has infected nearly 2 million computers all over the world, and with that, ZeroAccess botnet's masters are earning more than $2.7 million every month. ZeroAccess was first identified in 2011 by Symanetc, being used for click fraud, the malware can also be used to illicitly mine the v

Sheep Marketplace , one of the leading anonymous websites, after Silk Road 's closure by U.S. Prosecutors, allegedly selling drugs, has gone offline claiming it was robbed of $6 million worth of Bitcoins . Like Silk Road , Sheep Marketplace was a Deep Web site accessible via the Tor network and quickly grew into a replacement of other popular underground Bazaars. Weeks ago, the Administrator of the Sheep Marketplace announced that withdrawals  from online Wallet would be closed for a few hours as a new feature was being implemented, however deposits were still allowed. Recently, The market's administration left a short message for users, which reads: We are sorry to say, but we were robbed on Saturday 11/21/2013 by vendor EBOOK101. This vendor found a bug in the system and stole 5400 BTC – your money, our provisions, all was stolen. We were trying to resolve this problem, but we were not successful. We are sorry for your problems and inconvenience, all of the current BTC will be di

The increasing public attention of Bitcoin did not go unnoticed by Cyber Criminals who have begun unleashing Bitcoin Mining malware. Security researchers at Malwarebytes warned about a new malware threat, in which Bitcoin Miners are bundled with third party potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) that come bundled with legitimate applications. Malware allow cybercriminals to utilize systems' computing resources for their own gain. " This type of system hijacking is just another way for advertising based software to exploit a user into getting even more cash. " The malware is found to be using ' jhProtominer ' a popular mining software that runs via the command line, to abuse the CPUs and GPUs of infected computers to generate Bitcoins. Upon further investigation Malwarebytes found that the parent of the Bitcoin miner was " monitor.exe ", a part of YourFreeProxy application, which " beacons out constantly, waiting for commands from a remote server, eventually downlo

The breaking news is that, another Bitcoin exchange  company gets hacked i.e. BIPS ( bips.me ), one of the largest European Danish Bitcoin payment processors. On Friday evening, a bunch of cyber criminals just broke into BIPs - Bitcoin payment processor servers and wiped out around 1,295 Bitcoin from people's wallets, currently worth $1 Million. More than 22,000 consumer wallets have been compromised and BIPS will be contacting the affected users. Initially on 15th November, Hackers launched Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on BIPS, originate from Russia and neighboring countries and then hackers attacked again on 17th November. This time somehow they got access to several online Bitcoin wallets, which allowed them to steal the 1,295 BTC. " As a consequence Bips will temporarily close down the wallet initiative to focus on real-time merchant processing business which does not include storing of Bitcoins. " company says. " All existing users will be aske

Two most important moments in the history of Bitcoin are : Its creation by Satoshi Nakamoto , and the burst of The Silk Road's Founder  Ross William Ulbricht . The silk Road's black market was a Bitcoin economy. According to a report published by two Israeli computer scientists,  Ross William Ulbricht , aka Dread Pirate Roberts , may be financially linked to Satoshi Nakamoto. Even if the Bitcoin buyers and sellers remained anonymous, but the transactions themselves are public, So the scientists were able to trace the interactions. The Scientists, Ron and Shamir were exploring the connection between the operator of Silk Road who was recently arrested by the FBI for running the Internet blackmarket Silk Road and the entity that invented the bitcoin. The bitcoin network was established in 2008 and it has been popularly believed that the first accounts in the early days of the bitcoin were of Satoshi Nakamoto , accumulated some 77,600 BTC as a result of 'mining' Bitcoins

The  CryptoLocker Malware continues to spread, infected more than 12,000 U.S computers in one week and threatening millions of computers in the UK. Just last week, The UK National Crime Agency urge people afflicted by CryptoLocker not to pay ransom, not least because there is no guarantee that they will even receive an unlock key. Not even Police departments are immune to CryptoLocker. In November second week, Massachusetts' Swansea Police Department paid a 2 Bitcoin ($750 that time) ransom to decrypt images and Word documents encrypted by CryptoLocker ransomware . " It gave us 100 hours to pay and it was literally a timer, " said Police Department. " A big red screen comes up with a timer that says you have 100 hours to pay or your files will be encrypted forever. " Malware usually distributed through spam emails, encrypting the user's files on the infected machine and also the local network it is attached to. However, Police Depar

CryptoLocker is an especially insidious form of Ransomeware malware that was first detected in the wild in September 2013, restricts access to infected computers and requires victims to pay a ransom in order to regain full access. What makes CryptoLocker so bad is the way it encrypts the user data on your hard drive using a strong encryption method. This makes it literally impossible to access your own data without paying the ransom amount to the criminals between $100 and $300 or two  Bitcoins , even now more. Once affected you will be locked out of your computer and unless you pay the ransom amount in 72 hours , the virus will delete the decryption key to decrypt all the files on your PC . The malware lands on PCs the same way other malware does and a few sensible precautions will help minimize the chances of a CrytoLocker attack. Yesterday, we reported that - UK's National Crime Agency has given out an urgent national alert that a mass spamming event target

The UK's National Crime Agency has given out an urgent national alert that a mass spamming event targeting 10 million UK based email users with a piece of malware called CryptoLocker that encrypts your files and then demands a ransom money to restore access. The agency has said that the people who are majorly receiving targeted spam emails that appear to be from banks and other financial institutions. Each email comes with attachments that look like files such as a voicemail, fax, an invoice or details of a suspicious transaction, but is in fact Cryptolocker Ransomware malware that encrypts the user's computer. The public should be aware not to click on any such attachment. On Infected system, The Cryptolocker Malware screen will then display a countdown timer that demands the payment of 2 Bitcoins in ransom, worth around £536, for the decryption key. The NCCU is trying to trace that who is sending the emails. " We are working in cooperation wit