Security News
Scammers are sending fake replacement devices to Ledger customers exposed in a recent data breach that are used to steal cryptocurrency wallets. Ledger has been a popular target by scammers lately with rising cryptocurrency prices and the popularity of hardware wallets to secure cryptofunds.
China's crackdown on cryptocurrencies has reached a new crescendo, with the nation's Ministry of Public Security on Wednesday proclaiming it has arrested over 1000 people and shut down 170 gangs that provided crypto-linked money-laundering services. Others are what China calls "Two cards" scammers, who funnel their ill-gotten gains to acquire phone cards that are shipped outside China, then use call credit stored in the cards to make scam calls back into the Middle Kingdom.
The U.S. Department of Justice was able to trace and recover around half of the ransom payment sent to DarkSide by Colonial Pipeline. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed that it had managed to recover part of the ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline to its DarkSide attackers.
NortonLifelock has added the ability to mine Ethereum cryptocurrency directly within its Norton 360 antivirus program as a way to "Protect" users from malicious mining software. When Norton Crypto is enabled, the software will use the device's graphics card to mine for Ethereum, which will then be transferred into a Norton wallet hosted in the cloud.
A top Russian-language underground forum has been running a "Contest" for the past month, calling on its community to submit "Unorthodox" ways to conduct cryptocurrency attacks. The forum's administrator, in an announcement made on April 20, 2021, invited members to submit papers that assess the possibility of targeting cryptocurrency-related technology, including the theft of private keys and wallets, in addition to covering unusual cryptocurrency mining software, smart contracts, and non-fungible tokens.
State-sponsored hackers affiliated with North Korea have been behind a slew of attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges over the past three years, new evidence has revealed. Attributing the attack with "Medium-high" likelihood to the Lazarus Group, researchers from Israeli cybersecurity firm ClearSky said the campaign, dubbed "CryptoCore," targeted crypto exchanges in Israel, Japan, Europe, and the U.S., resulting in the theft of millions of dollars worth of virtual currencies.
Popular German cloud hosting and dedicated server provider Hetzner has banned cryptomining on its servers after users have been using their large storage devices to mine Chia. For those not familiar with Chia, instead of mining the cryptocurrency with specialized equipment or graphics cards, it uses a new mining system called Proof of Space and Proof of Time.
NVIDIA announced today that it's halving the hash rate for Etehereum cryptocurrency mining on the new GeForce RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti graphics cards to make them less desirable for miners. "Today, we're taking additional measures by applying a reduced ETH hash rate to newly manufactured GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards," said Matt Wuebbling, NVIDIA's Global Head of GeForce Marketing.
The US Federal Trade Commission says that over $80 million were lost to cryptocurrency investment scams, according to roughly 7,000 reports received since October 2020. The most vulnerable group to this type of scam were consumers aged 20 to 49 who were five times more likely to lose money, with more than half of all investment scam losses they reported being linked to cryptocurrency.
Bad actors put a new twist on an existing piece of malware to steal private keys for cryptocurrency accounts and other account credentials, according to analysis from Trend Micro. Panda Stealer uses a fileless approach and looks for private keys and records of previous transactions from cryptocurrency wallets including Dash, Bytecoin, Litecoin and Ethereum, according to Trend Micro.