Security News
Norwegian authorities announced on Thursday that they had recovered $5.9 million of cryptocurrency stolen in the Axie Infinity hack - an incident widely held to have been perpetrated by the Lazarus Group, which has links to North Korea. The Norwegian National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime has called the seizure among the largest ever money seizures - and the largest-ever related to crypto - made by Norway.
The FBI has confirmed what cybersecurity researchers have been saying for months: the North Korean-sponsored Lazarus Group was behind the theft last year of $100 million in crypto assets from blockchain startup Harmony. In its January 23 statement on the matter, the FBI said the attack on Harmony was part of a North Korean malware campaign named "TraderTraitor."
As you'll know if ever you've lost a phone, or damaged a SIM card, mobile phone numbers aren't burned into the phone itself, but are programmed into the subscriber identity module chip that you insert into your phone. A crook who can sweet-talk, or bribe, or convince using fake ID, or otherwise browbeat your mobile phone provider into issuing "You" a new SIM card.
Florida man Nicholas Truglia was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Thursday for his involvement in a fraud scheme that led to the theft of millions from cryptocurrency investor Michael Terpin. The funds were stolen following a January 2018 SIM swap attack that allowed Truglia's co-conspirators to hijack Terpin's phone number and fraudulently transfer roughly $23.8 million in cryptocurrency from his crypto wallet to an online account under Truglia's control.
The theft of billions of dollars in cryptocurrency over recent months could have been prevented, and confidential computing is a key to the security fix. Fireblocks uses confidential computing for multi-party computation for private key security.
A French-speaking criminal group codenamed OPERA1ER has pulled off more than 30 cyber-heists against telecom organizations and banks across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, stealing upwards of $30 million over four years, according to security researchers. In one robbery, "a network of more than 400 mule subscriber accounts were used to quickly cash out stolen funds mostly done overnight via ATMs," the researchers wrote in a report this month.
According to court documents [PDF] filed Friday in federal New York City court, Ellis Pinsky agreed to pay Michael Terpin $22 million for his starring role in the SIM swap and Bitcoin heist. In a Rolling Stone interview over the summer, Pinsky - dubbed Baby Al Capone by the media - admitted he swiped millions in crypto-coins from Terpin via a SIM swap.
Cryptocurrency market maker Wintermute says $160 million in digital assets have been stolen from it in a cyber-heist, though it assures customers that everything's fine. CEO Evgeny Gaevoy admitted on Twitter that Wintermute was suffering from an "Ongoing hack" affecting its decentralized finance operations, while its centralized finance and over-the-counter trading operations were unaffected.
Take-Two Interactive confirmed on Monday that its Rockstar Games subsidiary has been compromised and confidential data for Grand Theft Auto 6 has been stolen. The biz said work on Grand Theft Auto 6 will continue as planned and that the game's development and release schedule should not be affected.
Threat actors are making their way around two-factor authentication and using other clever evasion tactics in a recently observed phishing campaign aimed at taking over Coinbase accounts to defraud users of their crypto balances. Attackers employ a range of tactics to avoid detection, including one researchers call "Short lived domains"-in which the domains used in the attack "Stay alive for extremely short periods of time"-that deviates from typical phishing practices, researchers wrote.