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A Typo in Zerocoin's Source Code helped Hackers Steal ZCoins worth $585,000

A Typo in Zerocoin's Source Code helped Hackers Steal ZCoins worth $585,000
Feb 18, 2017
Are you a programmer? If yes, then you would know the actual pain of... "forgetting a semicolon," the hide and seek champion since 1958. Typos annoy everyone. Remember how a hacker's typo stopped the biggest bank heist in the history, saved $1 billion of Bangladesh bank from getting stolen. But this time a typo in the Zerocoin source code costs the company more than $585,000 in losses. Zerocoin cryptocurrency protocol is designed to add true cryptographic anonymity to Zcoin transactions that take full advantage of "Zero-Knowledge proofs" to ensure the complete financial privacy of users. Zcoin announced Friday that " a typographical error on a single additional character " in the Zerocoin source code helped an attacker to steal 370,000 Zerocoin, which is over $585,000 at today's price. "We estimate the attacker has created about 370,000 Zcoins which has been almost completely sold except for about 20,000+ Zcoin and absorbed on

Bitcoins - Secured by NSA designed Encryption or Backdoored ?

Bitcoins - Secured by NSA designed Encryption or Backdoored ?
Sep 13, 2013
It's been nearly three months since Edward Snowden started telling the world about the National Security Agency's mass surveillance of global communications. After the last week report that the National Security Agency has leveraged its cooperative relationships with specific industry partners to insert vulnerabilities into Internet security products. Bitcoin , a virtual currency, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, which is generated on a logarithmic scale by dedicated miners who run software that generate the complex hash codes which make up a Bitcoin.  The integrity of Bitcoin depends on a hash function called SHA-256 , which was designed by the NSA and published by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). Is it hard to believe that could the intelligence community have a secret exploit for Bitcoin? While there is no evidence yet to support the speculation. " If you assume that the NSA did something to SHA-256, which no outside resea

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
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