Security News

The UK's financial watchdog has fired a warning shot across the bow of Binance, and ordered it to place a notice on binance.com scaring off Brit crypto fans. This seems to have come about because Binance, which is ultimately based in the Cayman Islands, wanted to launch an exchange in the UK using its London-based affiliate Binance Markets Ltd. Since the start of the year, cryptocurrency firms in Britain have had to register with the nation's Financial Conduct Authority and meet its anti-money-laundering and anti-terrorism-funding requirements.

Up to $3.6bn in Bitcoin has disappeared from a South African cryptocurrency investment outfit as well as the two brothers who ran it. Africrypt, led by founder and CEO Raees Cajee and his sibling and COO Ameer, claimed two months ago it had been hacked and had to halt its operations.

Preparing for post-quantum cryptography is a paradox: on the one hand, we don't know for sure when, or perhaps even if, a large quantum computer will become available that can break all current public-key cryptography. The NIST report, Getting Ready For Post Quantum Cryptography, covers the development of an inventory and a migration playbook.

Will quantum cryptography mean the end of encryption? How was the FBI able to get bitcoins back in the Colonial Pipeline ransomware case? What is the ALPACA attack, and does it make your browsing less secure? Oh! No! of the week. LISTEN NOW. Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point in the podcast.

While the first quantum revolution used principles of quantum mechanics to develop new applications, the second revolution will enable engineers to manage the quantum mechanics themselves, controlling quantum systems at an individual level. The anticipated breakthroughs in quantum computing could define the next hundred years in the same way that the first quantum revolution shaped the 20th century.

A newly observed malicious campaign is targeting Kubeflow workloads to deploy TensorFlow pods that are used to mine for crypto-currency, according to a warning from security researchers at Microsoft. According to Microsoft, the recent campaign popped up on their radar at the end of May, when TensorFlow pods started being deployed at scale on multiple Kubernetes clusters.

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed a new large-scale campaign targeting Kubeflow deployments to run malicious cryptocurrency mining containers. "The burst of deployments on the various clusters was simultaneous. This indicates that the attackers scanned those clusters in advance and maintained a list of potential targets, which were later attacked on the same time," Microsoft's Senior Security Research Engineer Yossi Weizman said in a report.

New upgrades have been made to a Python-based "Self-replicating, polymorphic bot" called Necro in what's seen as an attempt to improve its chances of infecting vulnerable systems and evading detection. "Although the bot was originally discovered earlier this year, the latest activity shows numerous changes to the bot, ranging from different command-and-control communications and the addition of new exploits for spreading, most notably vulnerabilities in VMWare vSphere, SCO OpenServer, Vesta Control Panel and SMB-based exploits that were not present in the earlier iterations of the code," researchers from Cisco Talos said in a deep-dive published today.

Ransomware is used to lock up data and make organizations pay a ransom to regain access. A doxware attack not only keeps your data from you, but also threatens to publish the most sensitive data on Leak Sites or the Dark Web unless you pay a ransom.

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.