Security News

The US Treasury Department is levying sanctions against Tornado Cash, a notorious cryptocurrency mixer that it says has been used by threat groups like ransomware gang Lazarus to launder stolen digital assets. According to the government agency, Tornado Cash has been used to launder more than $455 million stolen by the North Korean-supported Lazarus Group, including more than $96 million in Wrapped Bitcoin, Ethereum and other digital assets from blockchain startup Harmony's Horizon Bridge service in June.

Email marketing firm Klaviyo suffered a data breach on August 3rd. Hackers gained access to internal systems after stealing an employee's credentials via a phishing attack. Hacker downloaded marketing lists used by cryptocurrency-related accounts, and for Klaviyo product and marketing updates.

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Tornado Cash today, a decentralized cryptocurrency mixer service used to launder more than $7 billion since its creation in 2019. The North Korean-backed APT Lazarus Group also used the crypto mixer to launder approximately $455 million stolen in the largest known cryptocurrency heist ever.

A new social engineering campaign by the notorious North Korean Lazarus hacking group has been discovered, with the hackers impersonating Coinbase to target employees in the fintech industry. A common tactic the hacking group uses is to approach targets over LinkedIn to present a job offer and hold a preliminary discussion as part of a social engineering attack.

Cryptocurrency bridge Nomad sent a message to the looters who drained nearly $200 million in tokens from its coffers earlier this week: return at least 90 percent of the ill-gotten gains, keep 10 percent as a bounty for discovering the security flaw, and Nomad will consider this a "White-hat" hack, as opposed to plain old theft, and not take legal action. Update: Nomad Bridge Hack Bounty(see below for details)Please send the funds to the official Nomad recovery wallet address on Ethereum: 0x94A84433101A10aEda762968f6995c574D1bF154 https://t.

DOUG. A critical Samba bug, yet another crypto theft, and Happy SysAdmin Day. Moving on to something not so great: a memory mismanagement bug in GnuTLS. DUCK. Yes, I thought this was worth writing up on Naked Security, because when people think of open-source cryptography, they tend to think of OpenSSL. Because that's the one that everybody's heard of, and it's the one that's probably had the most publicity in recent years over bugs, because of Heartbleed.

From what we can tell, and details are still light, somewhere between $4.5 million and $8 million in coins - including stablecoins USDC and USDT, and Solana's SOL - were taken from roughly 8,000 Slope and Phantom mobile app wallets. Phantom also makes a Solana-focused mobile wallet for Android and iOS. Coins were drained from some of its users' mobile wallets, though the majority of stolen funds were pulled from Slope wallets.

Hackers steal almost $200 million from crypto firm Nomad. U.S. crypto firm Nomad has been the victim of a digital theft that saw hackers make off with $190 million of cryptocurrencies owned by users of the service. On August 1, Nomad confirmed the theft in a tweet that said: "We are aware of the incident involving the Nomad token bridge. We are currently investigating and will provide updates when we have them."

One of the four encryption algorithms the US National Institute of Standards and Technology recommended as likely to resist decryption by quantum computers has has holes kicked in it by researchers using a single core of an Intel Xeon CPU, released in 2013. "Ran on a single core, the appended Magma code breaks the Microsoft SIKE challenges $IKEp182 and $IKEp217 in about 4 minutes and 6 minutes, respectively. A run on the SIKEp434 parameters, previously believed to meet NIST's quantum security level 1, took about 62 minutes, again on a single core," wrote Castryck and Decru, of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in a a preliminary article [PDF] announcing their discovery.

Cryptocurrency bridge service Nomad, which describes itself as "An optimistic interoperability protocol that enables secure cross-chain communication," has been drained of tokens notionally worth $190.7 million if exchanged for US dollars. Nomad allows cryptocurrency holders to trade their tokens across different blockchains, the distributed public ledgers used to track crypto assets.