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Rapidly Growing Electrum Botnet Infects Over 152,000 Users; Steals $4.6 Million

Rapidly Growing Electrum Botnet Infects Over 152,000 Users; Steals $4.6 Million

Apr 30, 2019
An ongoing attack against Electrum Bitcoin wallets has just grown bigger and stronger with attackers now targeting the whole infrastructure of the exchange with a botnet of over 152,000 infected users, raising the amount of stolen users' funds to USD 4.6 million. Electrum has been facing cyber attacks since December last year when a team of cybercriminals exploited a weakness in the Electrum infrastructure to trick wallet users into downloading the malicious versions of the software. In brief, the attackers added some malicious servers to the Electrum peer network which were designed to purposely display an error to legitimate Electrum wallet apps, urging them to download a malicious wallet software update from an unofficial GitHub repository. The phishing attack eventually allowed attackers to steal wallet funds (almost 250 Bitcoins that equals to about $937,000 at the time) and take full control over the infected systems. To counter this, the developers behind Electrum
Rogue Developer Infects Widely Used NodeJS Module to Steal Bitcoins

Rogue Developer Infects Widely Used NodeJS Module to Steal Bitcoins

Nov 27, 2018
A widely used third-party NodeJS module with nearly 2 million downloads a week was compromised after one of its open-source contributor gone rogue, who infected it with a malicious code that was programmed to steal funds stored in Bitcoin wallet apps. The Node.js library in question is "Event-Stream," a toolkit that makes it easy for developers to create and work with streams, a collection of data in Node.js — just like arrays or strings. The malicious code detected earlier this week was added to Event-Stream version 3.3.6, published on September 9 via NPM repository , and had since been downloaded by nearly 8 million application programmers. Event-Stream module for Node.js was originally created by Dominic Tarr, who maintained the Event-Stream library for a long time, but handed over the development and maintenance of the project several months ago to an unknown programmer, called "right9ctrl." Apparently, right9ctrl gained Dominic's trust by making
Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
Here’s How Hackers Can Hijack Your Online Bitcoin Wallets

Here's How Hackers Can Hijack Your Online Bitcoin Wallets

Sep 19, 2017
Researchers have been warning for years about critical issues with the Signaling System 7 (SS7) that could allow hackers to listen in private phone calls and read text messages on a potentially vast scale, despite the most advanced encryption used by cellular networks. Despite fixes being available for years, the global cellular networks have consistently been ignoring this serious issue, saying that the exploitation of the SS7 weaknesses requires significant technical and financial investment, so is a very low risk for people. However, earlier this year we saw a real-world attacks, hackers utilised this designing flaw in SS7 to drain victims' bank accounts by intercepting two-factor authentication code (one-time passcode, or OTP) sent by banks to their customers and redirecting it to themselves. If that incident wasn't enough for the global telecoms networks to consider fixing the flaws, white hat hackers from Positive Technologies now demonstrated how cybercriminals
cyber security

Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.
Bitstamp Bitcoin Exchange Hacked, $5 Million Stolen in Hack Attack

Bitstamp Bitcoin Exchange Hacked, $5 Million Stolen in Hack Attack

Jan 06, 2015
One of the biggest, reliable and most trusted Bitcoin exchange — Bitstamp — on Monday announced that it has been a target of a hacking attack, which lead to the theft of " less than 19,000 BTC" (worth about $5 million in virtual currency; one BTC is about $270). Bitstamp issued a statement on its official website in which the company warned its users not to deposit any Bitcoin to previously issued addresses, so as to prevent further losses. While the investigation is going on, the company has frozen its user accounts, blocked deposits as well as other transactions and suspended the trading business. After the Slovenian-based Bitcoin exchange suspected the security breach over the weekend that compromised one of Bitstamp's operational and active bitcoin storage wallets, the exchange suspended its service for the time being. The company reassured its users that the security breach only affected its " operational wallet ," i.e. only " a small fr
Malicious Chrome Extension Hijacks CryptoCurrencies and Wallets

Malicious Chrome Extension Hijacks CryptoCurrencies and Wallets

Apr 25, 2014
Although the number of malicious browser extensions has significantly increased in the past years, but recently a new extension of the Google Chrome is allegedly targeting Cryptocurrency users that is capable of stealing Bitcoins and other crypto coins silently. The malicious Chrome browser extension dubbed as ' Cryptsy Dogecoin (DOGE) Live Ticker ' which is available on Chrome Web store for free downloads and developed by " TheTrollBox " account. Reddit user noticed that the updated version of the extension has a malicious code, which is designed to hijack the crypto currency transactions. HOW CHROME EXTENSION STEALS CRYPTOCURRENCY It is very obvious that the kind of crypto related software extensions is downloaded only by the users who deal with the digital currency. So, once the user installed the malicious extension, the software within the extension starts monitoring users' web activity and looks for those users who go to Cryptocurrency exchange sites s
World’s largest Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox Shuts Down; CEO quits Bitcoin Foundation

World's largest Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox Shuts Down; CEO quits Bitcoin Foundation

Feb 25, 2014
World's largest Bitcoin exchange Mt. G ox  has shut down its website, withdrawal system, deleted its Twitter feed and halted all trading systems after it detected " unusual activity ." The Bitcoin Foundation, a Bitcoin advocacy group, confirmed th at Mark Karpeles , the chief executive of Tokyo-based Mt. Gox  bitcoin exchange has resigned from the board of the Bitcoin Foundation. This comes just days after the exchange gave an update regarding the technical issues. Last week, Mt. Gox said a technical glitch that had forced the exchange to suspend bitcoin withdrawals for a week. They discovered the transaction falsification glitch and same flaw alleged to have been used to steal all of the bitcoins worth about $2.7 million from Silk Road 2.0 . Later, some sources close to the matter have confirmed that more than 700,000 bitcoins are indeed missing from MtGox records, in a ' slow-leak ' hack that went on for years. The repeated technical glitches over
Bitcoin's Wallet Service Instawallet Hacked, suspended indefinitely

Bitcoin's Wallet Service Instawallet Hacked, suspended indefinitely

Apr 04, 2013
The digital currency Bitcoin has suffered yet another hack. Bitcoin wallet site Instawallet has been taken offline after a security compromise, has suspended its service indefinitely. Instawallet didn't say in a notice on its website how many bitcoins were stolen after hackers fraudulently accessed company database. " The Instawallet service is suspended indefinitely until we are able to develop an alternative architecture. Our database was fraudulently accessed, due to the very nature of Instawallet it is impossible to reopen the service as-is. " Bitcoin is a virtual currency that uses a peer-to-peer system to confirm transactions through public key cryptography. The company also announced it will accept claims for individual Instawallets for the first 90 days, using the wallets' URL and key to file the claim. Clients will then be refunded the currency value if the balance is less than 50 BTC. The breach follows a series of attacks targeting bitcoin services. In Sep
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