Security News

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The US Department of Justice on Monday said it has recovered 63.7 Bitcoins, right now worth $2.1m and falling, of the 75 or so BTC the Colonial Pipeline operators paid the ransomware miscreants who infected the fuel provider's computers. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Colonial contacted the Feds shortly after some of its internal IT systems were infected by the extortionware in early May, causing a temporary halt in operations.

Bitcoin scams have soared over the last seven months. The surge started around October 2020, and the scams are continuing today.

Just as Colonial Pipeline restored all of its systems to operational status in the wake of a crippling ransomware incident a week ago, DarkSide, the cybercrime syndicate behind the attack, claimed it lost control of its infrastructure, citing a law enforcement seizure. All the dark web sites operated by the gang, including its DarkSide Leaks blog, ransom collection site, and breach data content delivery network servers, have gone dark and remain inaccessible as of writing.

Since the DarkSide ransomware operation shut down a week ago, multiple affiliates have complained about not getting paid for past services and issued a claim for bitcoins in escrow at a hacker forum. To gain the trust of potential partners and expand the operation, DarkSide deposited 22 bitcoins on the popular hacker forum XSS. The wallet is managed by the site's administrator, which in this case acts as a guarantor for the gang and an arbitrator if a dispute occurs.

Since the DarkSide ransomware operation shut down a week ago, multiple affiliates have complained about not getting paid for past services and issued a claim for bitcoins in escrow at a hacker forum. To gain the trust of potential partners and expand the operation, DarkSide deposited 22 bitcoins on the popular hacker forum XSS. The wallet is managed by the site's administrator, which in this case acts as a guarantor for the gang and an arbitrator if a dispute occurs.

Wikipedia says MicroStrategy is a company that provides business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud-based services, but that wouldn't be the first outdated information on the crowdsourced knowledge repository. In a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the software company founded in 1989 said it would purchase $10m in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency at an average price of $43,663.

The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.

The good news is that the team is also helping users better protect themselves by raising awareness about these security issues and developing an app that addresses those vulnerabilities. The researchers showcased the Bitcoin Security Rectifier.

The person behind the Bitcoin Fog was identified and arrested. Bitcoin Fog was an anonymization service: for a fee, it mixed a bunch of people's bitcoins up so that it was hard to figure out where any individual coins came from.