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The U.S. Department of Justice today announced charges against nine individuals, 6 of which are members of a hacking group called "The Community" and other 3 are former employees of mobile phone providers who allegedly helped them steal roughly $2.5 million worth of the cryptocurrency using a method known as "SIM Swapping." According to the 15-count indictment unsealed today, five Americans and an Irishman related to The Community hacking group are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, as well as wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. Another three Americans, who reportedly are the former employees of mobile phone providers, are charged in a criminal complaint with the wire fraud. SIM Swapping , or SIM Hijacking , is a type of identity theft that typically involves fraudulently porting of the same number to a new SIM card belonging to the attacker. In SIM swapping, attackers social engineer a victim's mobile phone provider by convincing it

Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, confirmed today that the company lost nearly $41 million in Bitcoin in what appears to be its largest hack to date. In a statement, Binance's CEO Changpeng Zhao said the company discovered a "large scale security breach" earlier on May 7, as a result of which hackers were able to steal roughly 7000 bitcoins, which worth 40.6 million at the time of writing. News of the hack comes just hours after Zhao tweeted that Binance has "to perform some unscheduled server maintenance that will impact deposits and withdrawals for a couple of hours." According to the company, malicious attackers used a variety of attack techniques, including phishing and computer viruses, to carry out the intrusion and were able to breach a single BTC hot wallet (a cryptocurrency wallet that's connected to the Internet), which contained about 2% of the company's total BTC holdings, and withdraw stolen Bitcoins

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

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

Hackers yesterday stole nearly $19 million worth of cryptocurrency from Bithumb , the South Korea-based popular cryptocurrency exchange admitted today. According to Primitive Ventures' Dovey Wan, who first broke the information on social media, hackers managed to compromise a number of Bithumb's hot EOS and XRP wallets and transferred around 3 million EOS (~ $13 million) and 20 million XRP (~ $6 million) to his newly-created accounts. The hacker then distributedly transferred the stolen digital assets to his different accounts created on other cryptocurrency exchanges, including Huobi, HitBTC, WB, and EXmo, via ChangeNow, a non-custodial crypto swap platform does not require KYC/account. Bithumb has been hacked multiple times in the past. Last time the popular cryptocurrency exchange was hacked in June 2018, when hackers stole $31 million, and in July 2017, when hackers stole $1 million worth of EOS from many wallets belonging to its users. "And this is the se

Coinhive, a notorious in-browser cryptocurrency mining service popular among cybercriminals, has announced that it will discontinue its services on March 8, 2019. Regular readers of The Hacker News already know how Coinhive's service helped cyber criminals earn hundreds of thousands of dollars by using computers of millions of people visiting hacked websites . For a brief recap: In recent years, cybercriminals leveraged every possible web vulnerability [in Drupal , WordPress , and others ] to hack thousands of websites and wireless routers , and then modified them to secretly inject Coinhive's JavaScript-based Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency mining script on web-pages to financially benefit themselves. Millions of online users who visited those hacked websites immediately had their computers' processing power hijacked, also known as cryptojacking , to mine cryptocurrency without users' knowledge, potentially generating profits for cybercriminals in the background.

Cybercriminals have actively started exploiting an already patched security vulnerability in the wild to install cryptocurrency miners on vulnerable Drupal websites that have not yet applied patches and are still vulnerable. Last week, developers of the popular open-source content management system Drupal patched a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability (CVE-2019-6340) in Drupal Core that could allow attackers to hack affected websites. Despite releasing no technical details of the security vulnerability, the proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for the vulnerability was made publicly available on the Internet just two days after the Drupal security team rolled out the patched version of its software. Now, security researchers at data center security vendor Imperva discovered a series of attacks—that began just a day after the exploit code went public—against its customers' websites using an exploit that leverages the CVE-2019-6340 security flaw. The attacks or

A security researcher has discovered yet another cryptocurrency-stealing malware on the official Google Play Store that was designed to secretly steal bitcoin and cryptocurrency from unwitting users. The malware, described as a " Clipper ," masqueraded as a legitimate cryptocurrency app and worked by replacing cryptocurrency wallet addresses copied into the Android clipboard with one belonging to attackers, ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko explained in a blog post . Since cryptocurrency wallet addresses are made up of long strings of characters for security reasons, users usually prefer copying and pasting the wallet addresses using the clipboard over typing them out. The newly discovered clipper malware, dubbed Android/Clipper.C by ESET, took advantage of this behavior to steal users cryptocurrency. To do this, attackers first tricked users into installing the malicious app that impersonated a legitimate cryptocurrency service called MetaMask , claiming to let users

The developers behind the privacy-minded Zcash cryptocurrency have recently discovered and patched a highly dangerous vulnerability in the most secretive way that could have allowed an attacker to coin an infinite number of Zcash (ZEC). Yes, infinite… like a never-ending source of money. Launched in October 2016, Zcash is a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency that claims to be more anonymous than Bitcoin, as the sender, recipient, and value of transactions remain hidden. In a blog post published today, the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company—the startup behind Zcash—revealed that one of its employees, Ariel Gabizon, discovered the vulnerability in its code on 1st March 2018, the night prior to his talk at the Financial Cryptography conference almost a year ago. Gabizon contacted Sean Bowe, a Zcash Company's cryptographer, immediately after discovering the counterfeiting vulnerability, as dubbed by the team, and the team decided to keep the flaw secret in order to avoid the risk o

QuadrigaCX, the largest bitcoin exchange in Canada, has claimed to have lost CAD 190 million (nearly USD 145 million) worth of cryptocurrency after the exchange lost access to its cold (offline) storage wallets. Reason? Unfortunately, the only person with access to the company's offline wallet, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange, is dead. Following the sudden death of Gerry Cotten , founder and chief executive officer QuadrigaCX, the Canadian exchange this week filed for legal protection from creditors in the Nova Scotia Supreme Court until it locates and secures access to the lost funds. In a sworn affidavit filed by Cotten's widow Jennifer Robertson and obtained by Coindesk , Robertson said QuadrigaCX owes its customers some CAD 260 million (USD 198 Million) in both cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum, as well as fiat money. However, Robertson said the cryptocurrency exchange only has smaller amount in a 'hot wallet' (U

A 20-year-old college student who stole cryptocurrency worth more than $5 million by hijacking victims' phone numbers has pleaded guilty and accepted a sentence of 10 years in prison. Ortiz was arrested last year on charges of siphoning millions of dollars in cryptocurrency from around 40 victims using a method commonly known as " SIM swapping ," which typically involves fraudulently porting of the same number to a new SIM card belonging to the attacker. In SIM swapping, attackers social engineer a victim's mobile phone provider by making a phony call posing as their target and claiming that their SIM card has been lost and that they would like to request a SIM swap. The attackers attempt to convince the target's telecommunications company that they are the actual owner of the phone number they want to swap by providing required personal information on the target, like their SSNs and addresses, eventually tricking the telecoms to port the target's pho

Mac users need to beware of a newly discovered piece of malware that steals their web browser cookies and credentials in an attempt to withdraw funds from their cryptocurrency exchange accounts. Dubbed CookieMiner due to its capability of stealing cookies-related to cryptocurrency exchanges, the malware has specifically been designed to target Mac users and is believed to be based on DarthMiner, another Mac malware that was detected in December last year. Uncovered by Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 security research team, CookieMiner also covertly installs coin mining software onto the infected Mac machines to secretly mine for additional cryptocurrency by consuming the targeted Mac's system resources. In the case of CookieMiner, the software is apparently geared toward mining "Koto," a lesser-known, privacy-oriented cryptocurrency which is mostly used in Japan. However, the most interesting capabilities of the new Mac malware is to steal: Both Google Chro

Popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has suspended all transactions of Ethereum Classic (ETC)—the original unforked version of the Ethereum network—on their trading platforms, other products and services after detecting a potential attack on the cryptocurrency network that let someone spend the same digital coins twice. Why is this attack concerning? The heist resulted in the loss of $1.1 million worth of the Ethereum Classic digital currency. The digital currency immediately fell in price after the news came out. Coinbase revealed Monday that it identified "a deep chain reorganization" of the Ethereum Classic blockchain (or 51 percent attack of the network), which means that someone controlling the majority of miners on the network (over 50%) had modified the transaction history. After reorganizing the Ethereum blockchain, the attackers were able to what's called "double spend" about 219,500 ETC by recovering previously spent coins from the rightfu

Late last week an unknown hacker or a group of hackers successfully targeted a cryptocurrency exchange with an aim to steal Bitcoins by compromising the web analytics service it was using. ESET malware researcher Matthieu Faou this weekend spotted malicious JavaScript code on up to 700,000 websites that were bundled with the traffic tracking code from the leading web analytics platform StatCounter . However, after analyzing the code, the researchers found that hackers managed to compromise StatCounter and successfully replaced its tracking script with malicious JavaScript code primarily designed to target customers of the Gate.io cryptocurrency exchange. Like Google Analytics, StatCounter is also an old, but popular real-time web analytics platform reportedly being used by more than two million websites and generates stats on over 10 billion page views per month. Here's How Hackers Tried to Steal Bitcoins from Crypto Exchange Though the malicious code was also inject

Security researchers have discovered at least three massive malware campaigns exploiting hundreds of thousands of unpatched MikroTik routers to secretly install cryptocurrency miners on computers connected to them. In all, the malware campaigns have compromised more than 210,000 routers from Latvian network hardware provider Mikrotik across the world, with the number still increasing as of writing. The hackers have been exploiting a known vulnerability in the Winbox component of MikroTik routers that was discovered in April this year and patched within a day of its discovery, which once again shows people's carelessness in applying security patches on time. The security flaw can potentially allow an attacker to gain unauthenticated, remote administrative access to any vulnerable MikroTik router. The first campaign, noticed by Trustwave researchers, began with targeting networking devices in Brazil, where a hacker or a group of hackers compromised more than 183,700 Mikro

Ransomware has become a multimillion-dollar black market business for cybercriminals, and SamSam being a great example. New research revealed that the SamSam ransomware had extorted nearly $6 million from its victims since December 2015, when the cyber gang behind the ransomware started distributing the malware in the wild. Researchers at Sophos have tracked Bitcoin addresses owned by the attackers mentioned on ransom notes of each SamSam version and found the attackers have received more than $5.9 million from just 233 victims, and their profits are still on the rise, netting around $300,000 per month. "In total, we have now identified 157 unique addresses which have received ransom payments as well as 89 addresses which have been used on ransom notes and sample files but, to date, have not received payments," the new report by Sophos reads. SamSam Ransomware Attacks > What makes SamSam stand out from other forms of ransomware is that SamSam is not distributed

Again some bad news for cryptocurrency users. KICKICO, a blockchain-based initial coin offering (ICO) support platform, has fallen victim to a suspected cyber attack and lost more than 70 million KICK tokens (or KickCoins) worth an estimated $7.7 million. In a statement released on its Medium post on July 26, the company acknowledged the security breach, informing its customers that an unknown attacker managed to gain access to the account of the KICK smart contracts and the tokens of the KICKICO platform on last Thursday at around 9:04 (UTC). KICKICO admitted that the company had no clue about the security breach until and unless several of its customers fell victim and complained about losing KickCoin tokens worth $800,000 from their wallets overnight. However, after investigating, the company found that the total amount of stolen funds was 70,000,000 KickCoin, which, at the current exchange rate, is equivalent to $ 7.7 million. KICKICO reported that suspected attackers

Following Apple's lead in banning cryptocurrency mining apps , Google has also updated its Play Store policy this week to ban apps that mine cryptocurrencies on users' devices in the background. However, there are countless cryptocurrency mining apps, including MinerGate, AA Miner, NeoNeonMiner, and Crypto Miner, still available on the Play Store. Cryptocurrency mining is not a new concept, but the technology has recently been abused in the past year after hackers found it a great way to make millions of dollars by hijacking PCs to secretly mine cryptocurrency in the background without their users' knowledge or consent. Due to this practice, cryptocurrency mining has emerged as one of the biggest threats , raising negative sentiments towards this alternative revenue scheme, and big tech giants like Apple and Google took strict measures to put restrictions on such apps. Over a month ago, Apple updated its App Store guidelines to ban cryptocurrency mining apps and

Security researchers have discovered an interesting piece of malware that infects systems with either a cryptocurrency miner or ransomware, depending upon their configurations to decide which of the two schemes could be more profitable. While ransomware is a type of malware that locks your computer and prevents you from accessing the encrypted data until you pay a ransom to get the decryption key required to decrypt your files, cryptocurrency miners utilize infected system's CPU power to mine digital currencies . Both ransomware and cryptocurrency mining-based attacks have been the top threats so far this year and share many similarities such as both are non-sophisticated attacks, carried out for money against non-targeted users, and involve digital currency. However, since locking a computer for ransom doesn't always guarantee a payback in case victims have nothing essential to losing, in past months cybercriminals have shifted more towards fraudulent cryptocurrency

Security researchers have been warning about a new malicious campaign that leverages an alternative scheme to mine cryptocurrencies without directly injecting the infamous CoinHive JavaScript into thousands of hacked websites. Coinhive is a popular browser-based service that offers website owners to embed JavaScript code that utilizes their website visitors' CPUs power in order to mine the Monero cryptocurrency for monetization. However, since its inception, mid-2017, cybercriminals have been abusing the service to illegally make money by injecting their own version of CoinHive JavaScript code to a large number of hacked websites, eventually tricking their millions of visitors into unknowingly mine Monero coins. Since a lot of web application security firms and antivirus companies have now updated their products to detect unauthorized injection of CoinHive JavaScript, cybercriminals have now started abusing a different service from CoinHive to achieve the same. Hackers