Security News
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.
Twitter scammers are jumping on Elon Musk's hosting of Saturday Night Live to push cryptocurrency scams to steal people's Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin. For the past year, we have been reporting how scammers have been raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars by promoting fake giveaway scams from well-known people or companies, such as Elon Musk, Tesla, and Gemini Exchange.
In a post on Thursday, the researchers picked apart the WeSteal cryptocurrency wallet-pickpocketing tool and a related remote-access trojan called WeControl, saying that it's "Shameless" the way the developers aren't even trying to hide the tools' true intent. Code samples point to WeSteal having evolved from that earlier tool.
Cryptocurrency trading platform Hotbit has shut down all services for at least a week after a cyberattack that down several of its services on Thursday evening. Hotbit assured its roughly 2 million registered users from over 210 countries that their cryptocurrency assets were "Safe and secure."
Unpatched Microsoft Exchange servers are being targeted by the Prometei botnet and added to its operators' army of Monero cryptocurrency mining bots. Based on new malware samples recently found by Cybereason during recent incident responses, the botnet has also been updated to exploit Exchange Server vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft in March.
As the use of cryptocurrency increases, so does the risk of being a target for scammers. Tom Merritt offers five tips for defending against cryptocurrency scams.
As the use of cryptocurrency increases, so does the risk of being a target for scammers. Tom Merritt offers five tips for defending against cryptocurrency scams.