Bitcoin | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (aka Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) has seized the online infrastructure and shutdown linked to the eXch cryptocurrency exchange over allegations of money laundering and operating a criminal trading platform. The operation was carried out on April 30, 2025, authorities said, adding they also confiscated 8 terabytes worth of data and cryptocurrency assets worth €34 million ($38.25 million) in Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, and Dash. According to the BKA, eXch[.]cx, existed since 2014 and offered cryptocurrency swapping services, allowing its users to exchange digital assets. It was available both on the clearnet and the dark web. eXch "specifically advertised on platforms of the criminal underground economy (UE) that it did not implement any anti-money laundering measures," the BKA said in a statement. "Users were neither required to identify themselves to the service, nor was user data stored there. Crypto swapping via eXch was...

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday granted a "full and unconditional pardon" to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the infamous Silk Road drug marketplace, after spending more than 11 years behind bars. "I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross," Trump said in a post shared on Truth Social. "The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!" Launched in February 2011, Silk Road emerged as a major hub on the dark web for illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services. The marketplace generated over $200 million in revenue in its nearly three years of existence, per authorities. It was taken down in Octobe...

A Brazilian citizen has been charged in the United States for allegedly threatening to release data stolen by hacking into a company's network in March 2020. Junior Barros De Oliveira , 29, of Curitiba, Brazil has been charged with four counts of extortionate threats involving information obtained from protected computers and four counts of threatening communications, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said in an unsealed indictment earlier this week. The said victim, a Brazilian subsidiary of a New Jersey-based company, had its computers breached by the defendant, who then exploited the access to steal confidential customer information from about 300,000 customers on at least three occasions. De Oliveira is alleged to have subsequently sent the chief executive officer (CEO) of the company an email message in September 2020 using an alias, demanding a payment of 300 bitcoin (valued at about $3.2 million at the time) in return for not selling the data. A month later, the de...

Ilya Lichtenstein, who pleaded guilty to the 2016 hack of cryptocurrency stock exchange Bitfinex, has been sentenced to five years in prison, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced Thursday. Lichtenstein was charged for his involvement in a money laundering scheme that led to the theft of nearly 120,000 bitcoins (valued at over $10.5 billion at current prices) from the crypto exchange. Heather Rhiannon Morgan, his wife, also pleaded guilty to the same crimes last year. They were both arrested in February 2022. Morgan is scheduled to be sentenced on November 18. "Lichtenstein, 35, hacked into Bitfinex's network in 2016, using advanced hacking tools and techniques," the DoJ said in a press statement. "Once inside the network, Lichtenstein fraudulently authorized more than 2,000 transactions transferring 119,754 bitcoin from Bitfinex to a cryptocurrency wallet in Lichtenstein's control." TRM Labs said Lichtenstein exploited a vulnerability in Bit...

The 36-year-old founder of the Bitcoin Fog cryptocurrency mixer has been sentenced to 12 years and six months in prison for facilitating money laundering activities between 2011 and 2021. Roman Sterlingov, a dual Russian-Swedish national, pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business earlier this March. The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) described Bitcoin Fog as the darknet's longest-running cryptocurrency mixer , allowing cybercriminals to conceal the source of their cryptocurrency proceeds. "Over the course of its decade-long operation, Bitcoin Fog gained notoriety as a go-to money laundering service for criminals seeking to hide their illicit proceeds from law enforcement and processed transactions involving over 1.2 million bitcoin, valued at approximately $400 million at the time the transactions occurred," the DoJ said . "The bulk of this cryptocurrency came from darknet marketplaces and was tied ...

A "multi-faceted campaign" has been observed abusing legitimate services like GitHub and FileZilla to deliver an array of stealer malware and banking trojans such as Atomic (aka AMOS), Vidar, Lumma (aka LummaC2), and Octo by impersonating credible software like 1Password, Bartender 5, and Pixelmator Pro. "The presence of multiple malware variants suggests a broad cross-platform targeting strategy, while the overlapping C2 infrastructure points to a centralized command setup — possibly increasing the efficiency of the attacks," Recorded Future's Insikt Group  said  in a report. The cybersecurity firm, which is tracking the activity under the moniker GitCaught, said the campaign not only highlights the misuse of authentic internet services to orchestrate cyber attacks, but also the reliance on multiple malware variants targeting Android, macOS, and Windows to increase the success rate. Attack chains entail the use of fake profile...

A forensic analysis of a graph dataset containing transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain has revealed clusters associated with illicit activity and money laundering, including detecting criminal proceeds sent to a crypto exchange and previously unknown wallets belonging to a Russian darknet market. The  findings  come from Elliptic in collaboration with researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. The 26 GB dataset, dubbed  Elliptic2 , is a "large graph dataset containing 122K labeled subgraphs of Bitcoin clusters within a background graph consisting of 49M node clusters and 196M edge transactions," the co-authors  said  in a paper shared with The Hacker News. Elliptic2 builds on the  Elliptic Data Set  (aka Elliptic1), a transaction graph that was made public in July 2019 with the goal of  combating financial crime  using graph convolutional neural networks ( GCNs ). The idea, in a nutshell, is to uncover u...

A 31-year-old Moldovan national has been sentenced to 42 months in prison in the U.S. for operating an illicit marketplace called E-Root Marketplace that offered for sale hundreds of thousands of compromised credentials, the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced. Sandu Boris Diaconu was charged with conspiracy to commit access device and computer fraud and possession of 15 or more unauthorized access devices. He pleaded guilty on December 1, 2023. "The E-Root Marketplace operated across a widely distributed network and took steps to hide the identities of its administrators, buyers, and sellers," the DoJ  said  last week. "Buyers could search for compromised computer credentials on E-Root, such as usernames and passwords that would allow buyers to access remote computers for purposes of stealing private information or manipulating the contents of the remote computer." Prospective customers could also search for RDP and SSH credentials based on various filter c...

A 34-year-old Russian-Canadian national has been sentenced to nearly four years in jail in Canada for his participation in the LockBit global ransomware operation. Mikhail Vasiliev , an Ontario resident, was  originally arrested  in November 2022 and charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) with "conspiring with others to intentionally damage protected computers and to transmit ransom demands in connection with doing so." News of Vasiliev's jail term was  first reported  by CTV News.  The defendant, who had his home searched by Canadian law enforcement authorities in August and October 2022, is said to have kept a list of "prospective or historical" victims and screenshots of communications exchanged with "LockBitSupp" on the Tox messaging platform. The raid also uncovered a text file with instructions to deploy LockBit ransomware, the ransomware source code, and a control panel used by the e-crime group to deliver the file-locking malware....

Update: The U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) has confirmed the takedown of LockBit infrastructure. Read here for more details . An international law enforcement operation has led to the seizure of multiple darknet domains operated by  LockBit , one of the most prolific ransomware groups, marking the latest in a long list of digital takedowns. While the full extent of the effort, codenamed  Operation Cronos , is presently unknown, visiting the group's .onion website displays a seizure banner containing the message "The site is now under the control of law enforcement." Authorities from 11 countries, Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K., and the U.S., alongside Europol participated in the joint exercise. Malware research group VX-Underground, in a  message  posted on X (formerly Twitter), said the websites were taken down by exploiting a critical security flaw impacting PHP ( CVE-2023-3824 , CVSS score...

A  CACTUS ransomware campaign  has been observed exploiting recently disclosed security flaws in a cloud analytics and business intelligence platform called Qlik Sense to obtain a foothold into targeted environments. "This campaign marks the first documented instance [...] where threat actors deploying CACTUS ransomware have exploited vulnerabilities in Qlik Sense for initial access," Arctic Wolf researchers Stefan Hostetler, Markus Neis, and Kyle Pagelow  said . The cybersecurity company, which said it's responding to "several instances" of exploitation of the software, noted that the attacks are likely taking advantage of three flaws that have been disclosed over the past three months - CVE-2023-41265  (CVSS score: 9.9) - An HTTP Request Tunneling vulnerability that allows a remote attacker to elevate their privilege and send requests that get executed by the backend server hosting the repository application. CVE-2023-41266  (CVSS score: 6.5) - A path tr...

A coalition of law enforcement agencies across Europe and the U.S.  announced  the takedown of ChipMixer, an unlicensed cryptocurrency mixer that began its operations in August 2017. "The ChipMixer software blocked the blockchain trail of the funds, making it attractive for cybercriminals looking to launder illegal proceeds from criminal activities such as drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, ransomware attacks, and payment card fraud," Europol  said  in a statement. The coordinated exercise, besides dismantling the clearnet and dark web websites associated with ChipMixer, also resulted in the seizure of $47.5 million in Bitcoin and 7 TB of data. Mixers, also called tumblers,  offer full anonymity  for a fee by commingling cryptocurrency from different users – both legitimate and criminally-derived funds – in a manner that makes it hard to trace the origins. This is achieved by funneling different payments into a single pool before splitting up each ...

Google has won a lawsuit filed against two Russian nationals in connection with the operation of a botnet called Glupteba , the company  said  last week. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York imposed monetary sanctions against the defendants and their U.S.-based legal counsel. The defendants have also been asked to pay Google's attorney fees. The defendants' move to press sanctions against Google was denied. The development comes nearly a year after the tech giant  took down  the malware's command-and-control infrastructure and initiated legal proceedings against Dmitry Starovikov and Alexander Filippov , who are said to have been in charge of running the illegal botnet. The defendants, along with 15 others, have also been accused of using the malware to create a hacked network of devices to mine cryptocurrencies, harvest victims' personal and financial data, and place disruptive ads. Gluteba is distinguished from its botnet counterpart...

Bitcoin ATM manufacturer General Bytes confirmed that it was a victim of a cyberattack that exploited a previously unknown flaw in its software to plunder cryptocurrency from its users. "The attacker was able to create an admin user remotely via CAS administrative interface via a URL call on the page that is used for the default installation on the server and creating the first administration user," the company  said  in an advisory last week. "This vulnerability has been present in CAS software since version 2020-12-08." It's not immediately clear how many servers were breached using this flaw and how much cryptocurrency was stolen. CAS is short for  Crypto Application Server , a self-hosted product from General Bytes that enables companies to manage Bitcoin ATM ( BATM ) machines from a central location via a web browser on a desktop or a mobile device. The zero-day flaw, which concerned a bug in the CAS admin interface, has been mitigated in two server p...

The first ever incident possibly involving the ransomware family known as Maui occurred on April 15, 2021, aimed at an unnamed Japanese housing company. The disclosure from Kaspersky arrives a month after U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies issued an  advisory  about the use of the ransomware strain by North Korean government-backed hackers to target the healthcare sector since at least May 2021. Much of the data about its modus operandi came from incident response activities and industry analysis of a Maui sample that revealed a lack of "several key features" typically associated with ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operations. Not only is Maui designed to be manually executed by a remote actor via a command-line interface, it's also notable for not including a ransom note to provide recovery instructions. Subsequently, the Justice Department  announced  the seizure of $500,000 worth of Bitcoin that were extorted from several organizations, including t...

The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday placed sanctions against crypto mixing service Tornado Cash, citing its use by the North Korea-backed Lazarus Group in the high-profile hacks of Ethereum bridges to launder and cash out the ill-gotten money. Tornado Cash, which allows users to move cryptocurrency assets between accounts by obfuscating their origin and destination, is estimated to have been used to launder more than $7.6 billion worth of virtual assets since its creation in 2019, the department said. Thefts, hacks, and fraud account for $1.54 billion of the total assets sent through the mixer, according to blockchain analytics firm  Elliptic . Crypto mixing is akin to shuffling digital currencies through a black box, blending a certain quantity of cryptocurrency in private pools before transferring it to its designated receivers for a fee. The aim is to make transactions anonymous and difficult to trace. "Despite public assurances otherwise, Tornado Cash has repeatedly f...

A new botnet named Orchard has been observed using Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto's account transaction information to generate domain names to conceal its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure. "Because of the uncertainty of Bitcoin transactions, this technique is more unpredictable than using the common time-generated [ domain generation algorithms ], and thus more difficult to defend against," researchers from Qihoo 360's Netlab security team said in a Friday write-up. Orchard is said to have undergone three revisions since February 2021, with the botnet primarily used to deploy additional payloads onto a victim's machine and execute commands received from the C2 server. It's also designed to upload device and user information as well as infect USB storage devices to propagate the malware. Netlab's analysis shows that over 3,000 hosts have been enslaved by the malware to date, most of them located in China. Orchard has also been subjected to ...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has announced the seizure of $500,000 worth of Bitcoin from North Korean hackers who extorted digital payments from several organizations by using a new ransomware strain known as Maui. "The seized funds include ransoms paid by healthcare providers in Kansas and Colorado," the DoJ  said  in a press release issued Tuesday. The recovery of the bitcoin ransoms comes after the agency said it took control of two cryptocurrency accounts that were used to receive payments to the tune of $100,000 and $120,000 from the medical centers. The DoJ did not disclose where the rest of the payments originated from. "Reporting cyber incidents to law enforcement and cooperating with investigations not only protects the United States, it is also good business," said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the DoJ's National Security Division. "The reimbursement to these victims of the ransom shows why it pays to work with law en...