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Evolution -- The largest Deep Web drugs marketplace, disappeared suddenly overnight from the Internet. But unlike Silk Road, there is no indication that the law enforcement took down the Evolution marketplace. The Darknet's most popular markets for drugs and bespoke carjacking services is mysteriously offline Wednesday with rumours circulating over the Internet that its own administrators may have just scammed its huge user base and stole $12 Millions in Bitcoin. The Evolution black marketplace opened in January 2014, and gained popularity after the shutdown of Silk ​Road and arrest of its unassuming founder, Ross U​lbricht , with a promise of less fraud. Like Silk Road , Evolution also dealt in drugs, as well as illegal weapons, counterfeit goods, stolen credit cards and guides to committing fraud. Evolution was only accessible through anonymity Tor network. At the time of its apparent vanish, Evolution was home to nearly 20,000 drug sales, far more than Silk Road

If you have recently installed or updated the popular BitTorrent client μTorrent 3.4.2 Build 28913 on your computer, then you read this warning post right now. Users of the μTorrent file-sharing service are complaining that the latest update of software used for torrent downloading is silently installing a piece of unwanted software called EpicScale , which is basically a Bitcoin mining software . Note: Story update has been added below. USER COMPLAINTS ON SILENT  INSTALLATION The Epic Scale , installed without the consent of users, is a cryptocurrency mining software that reportedly uses the combined computing power of users to generate Bitcoin income for BitTorrent company. The unwanted software slows down the host computers and is particularly harder to remove from the system. The Bitcoin mining software was recently highlighted at uTorrent's complaint forum where a member ' Groundrunner ' says: " There was no information about this during installation

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

A new Tails 1.3 has been released with support to a secure Bitcoin wallet. Tails, also known as the ' Amnesic Incognito Live System ', is a free security-focused Debian-based Linux distribution, specially designed and optimized to preserve users' anonymity and privacy. Tails operating system came to light when the global surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden said that he had used it in order to remain Anonymous and keep his communications hidden from the law enforcement authorities. Tails 1.3 offers new applications, updates to the Tor browser, and fixes a number of security vulnerabilities from previous releases of the software and specially introduces Electrum Bitcoin Wallet . NEW FEATURES IN Tails OS 1.3 Electrum Bitcoin Wallet Updated Tor Browser Bundle obfs4 pluggable transport KeyRinger Electrum Bitcoin Wallet is one of the major changes Tails 1.3 received. Electrum is a new open-source and easy-to-use bitcoin wallet that protects you fro

Cyber criminals have started targeting government enforcement of the Ransomware in an attempt to extort money. Recently, the police department of the Midlothian Village in Illinois has paid a ransom of over $600 in Bitcoins to an unknown hacker after being hit by a popular ransomware attack. The popular Ransomware, dubbed Cryptoware , disabled a police computer in Midlothian — located south of Chicago — by making it inaccessible through its file-encryption capabilities and forced them to pay a ransom in order to restore access to the important police records. The Chicago Tribune reported that the department first encountered Cryptoware in January, when someone in the department opened a spear-phishing email that pointed to the malicious software. Once opened, the email carrying the Cryptoware ransomware immediately encrypts the files on the computer and, in typical ransomware style, displays a message demanding money in exchange for a decrypt code that could free the

An all new anonymous online underground black market website, DarkLeaks , has been introduced on the Internet where Whistleblowers, blackmailers, hackers and any individual can trade/sell sensitive and valuable data/secrets anonymously in exchange for Bitcoin payments . DarkLeaks is a decentralized underground blackmarket which is built on top of the Bitcoin Blockchain technology and is available on the Internet to download as a free software package together with its source code published openly on code-sharing site Github . TRADE INFORMATION ANONYMOUSLY DarkLeaks underground black market website is masterminded by the members of crypto-anarchist collective System. " There is no identity, no central operator and no interaction between leaker and buyers, " the developers' statement says. " DarkLeaks is a decentralized black market where you can sell information ," according to the blog post about the new site. " It has a mechanism for trust-less authent

The Famous Internet entrepreneur and former hacker Kim Dotcom , who introduced legendary Megaupload and MEGA file sharing services to the World, has came up with another crazy idea — To start his very own Internet that uses the "blockchain". Just last month, Kim Dotcom, a German millionaire formerly known as Kim Schmitz , launched the public beta of its end-to-end encrypted video and audio chat service called " MegaChat ", which it says gives better protection than alternatives such as Skype and Google Hangouts. Now, his latest series of tweets referred to Kim Dotcom's supposed " MegaNet " which, he believes, would be immune to the global mass surveillance conducted by governments or corporations and would not be based on IP addresses. MegaNet would be a decentralized, non-IP based network in which the blockchain used by Bitcoin will play an " important role ". Decentralizing the Internet means to take the power of the Web

The most popular Chinese Bitcoin exchange BTER announced that it has been hacked on Valentine's Day and lost more than £1.1 Million-worth ($1.75 Million; one BTC is about $270) of the digital currency. The Bitcoin Exchange hasn't revealed more details about suspects behind the breach or how the cold wallets were compromised, except that 7,170 Bitcoin cryptocurrency was stolen from the company's " cold wallets ," a way of storing the digital currency offline. " All wallets have been shut down and withdrawals of unaffected coins will be arranged later, " the official website of BTER Bitcoin exchange states. Internet sleuths are already on the hunt to trace the missing Bitcoin. Because of the way the digital currency works, it is possible to trace any transaction or funds easily by using public available service, called " blockchain ." According to the announcement, the stolen Bitcoin cryptocurrencies were broadcast through the trans

A jury has found Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht  a.k.a Dread Pirate Roberts  guilty on all seven counts and faces Life In Prison for running an underground black market i.e.  Silk Road . Ross Ulbricht, a San Francisco 30-year-old web developer was arrested by FBI in a sting operation in October 2013 accusing him of being the criminal mastermind running Silk Road, where hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal goods were traded. Ross Ulbricht had claimed that he had built Silk Road, but he was not the site's notorious ringleader " Dread Pirate Roberts. " The trial went on for just over three weeks and today the jury of six men and six women charged Ross Ulbricht with seven counts including money laundering, drug trafficking and computer hacking among other things. " The supposed anonymity of the dark web is not a protective shield from arrest and prosecution ," according to Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in a statement after the verdict. Prose

We have seen a series of Ransomware tended to be simple with dogged determinations to extort money from victims. But with the exponential rise in the samples of Ransomware last year, we saw more subtle in design, including " Cryptolocker " that was taken down along with the " Gameover ZeuS " botnet last June. As a result, another improved ransomware packages have sprung up to replace it — CryptoWall . Ransomware is an emerging threat in the evolution of cybercriminals techniques to part you from your money. Typically, the malicious software either lock victim's computer system or encrypt the documents and files on it, in order to extort money from the victims. Since last year, criminals have generated an estimated US$1 million profits. Now, the infamous Cryptowall ransomware is back with the newest and improved version of the file-encrypting ransomware program, which has been spotted compromising victims by researchers early this week, security research

Multiple successors of the original Silk Road have come and all have been taken offline in recent years, but aside from selling illegal goods and services, they all have had one thing in common – they've all relied on the Tor network. A new version of the anonymous online black market Silk Road, has re-appeared on the dark web, but this time the website doesn't rely on the now infamous Tor network and neither it deals in only Bitcoins. The new version of the notorious online black market, dubbed " Silk Road Reload​ed ", launched Sunday on the little-known " I2P " anonymous network, dealing with a range of cryptocurrencies including the meme-inspired Dogecoin. In short, apart from the name, there is no connection between the original Silk Road website and the newly launched Silk Road Reloaded . Silk Road Reloaded is only accessible by downloading the special software called I2P (Invisible Internet Project) , or by configuring your systems

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

Till now, he have heard about " Bitcoin digital wallet hacked " or " Bitcoin website hacked ", but now a hacker has stolen cryptocurrency from mining pools and generated $83,000 in digital cash in more than four months by gaining access to a Canadian Internet provider. Bitcoin is a virtual currency that makes use of cryptography to create and transfer bitcoins. Users make use of digital wallets to store bitcoin addresses from which bitcoins are received or sent. Bitcoin uses public-key cryptography so that each address is associated with a pair of mathematically linked public and private keys that are held in the wallet. Researchers at Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) , a cyber intelligence company, have discovered a series of malicious activities in which a cryptocurrency thief used bogus Border Gateway Protocol ( BGP ) broadcasts to hijack networks belonging to no less than 19 Internet service providers, including Amazon and other hosting services like DigitalO

Once again Facebook is on The Hacker News ! This time not for any scam or surveillance, but for a different reason.  The social networking giant has managed to take down a Greek botnet that used Facebook to spread malware and infected 250,000 computers to mine crypto-currencies, steal bitcoins, email passwords and banking details. Facebook is always one of the favourite weapon of cyber criminals, cyber thieves and scammers due to its popularity among other social media platforms. This social networking platform, with more than one billion active users, provides special opportunities for people to connect and share information, as well as also serves a great platform for malware developers and scammers. The botnet, dubbed as Lecpetex , was around from December 2013 to last month and compromised around 50,000 Facebook accounts at its peak, under which users would receive spam Facebook messages that would typically like "lol" with a zip archive attachment . O

If you are dealing in cryptocurrency Bitcoin and have Microsoft's Security Essentials (MSE) installed on your system, then you could be infected by a virus called " DOS/STONED " from the Bitcoin BlockChain. With a number of high-profile cases of fraud, theft, and technical incompetence against the bitcoins, it seems like cyber criminals are looking to scam unsuspecting customers. Blockchain is Bitcoin's most popular bitcoin wallet and block explorer. It is a central part of the Bitcoin system that includes a log file in which all bitcoin transactions are recorded. It stores the wallet data in encrypted form and runs on privately owned dedicated hardware. In an discussion on the Microsoft discussion boards, a user go by the name ' edc678 ' claimed that  Microsoft's Security Essentials  is showing alerts of the signature of the STONED virus in the Bitcoin BlockChain, which could only allow an attacker to write small chunk of text to accomp

Last October, the ' Silk Road ' story broke when its owner Ross William Ulbricht , a 29-year-old who allegedly created and managed the Silk Road underground website, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The police seized the website that was considered one of the most popular Underground places on the Internet for buying drugs and other illicit goods and services. Just some days after the Shutdown of Silk Road , Authorities in Britain, Sweden, and the United States arrested eight more vendors who dedicatedly used to sell illegal drugs on Silk Road. Yesterday, Cornelis Jan Slomp , a 22-year old Dutch man who allegedly used the Silk Road underground black market website to sell illegal drugs for bitcoins worth millions of dollars has agreed to plead guilty in Chicago federal court to federal drug conspiracy charge filed against him, according to a statement issued by U.S. Attorney Zachary T. Fardon in Chicago and Slomp's lawyer. FBI CASHING OUT  SEI

Google always bound to face trouble over the wide and open nature of its app checking policies on Google Play Store, and despite so many security measures, the search engine giant mostly fails to recognize the Android malware that are lurking around its Google Play store in vast numbers. Recently, Google had offered users refund and additional credit of $5 for the bogus antivirus app ' Virus Sheild ' that potentially defrauded more than 10,000 Android users who have downloaded the app from the Google play store. The step taken by Google is really appreciated, as the refunding cost Google around $269,000. Now, it has been found that a number of malicious Android apps on the Google Play store secretly turn users' android devices into small rigs contributing to a large-scale crypto currency mining operation. CRYPTO MINER IN ANDROID APP Security researchers from an anti-malware firm Lookout have identified various malware apps at Google Play Store, which they dub

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