Two weeks ago, with more than 1,000 other Crypto enthusiasts, I had the pleasure of attending the NYC launch event for Hadera Hashgraph, a new public blockchain promising vastly faster throughput.
Source: medium.com
There are many thought leaders trying to find alternatives to Proof of Work. The most promising one so far is Proof of Stake. There are already production-ready blockchains based on Proof of Stake like Nxt and Neo.
Ethereum is probably moving to Proof of Stake—their Casper project is already live on their test net.
Source: medium.com
Virtual currency transactions are taxable by law just like transactions in any other property. The IRS has issued guidance in IRS Notice 2014-21for use by taxpayers and their return preparers that addresses transactions in virtual currency, also known as digital currency.
Source: irs.gov
Trend Micro uncovered a new crypto mining campaign targeting Linux servers that exploit the CVE-2013-2618 flaw in Cacti’s Network Weathermap plug-in, which system administrators use to visualize network activity.
Source: securityaffairs.co
According to the researcher Giovanni Collazo, querying the popularShodan search engine he found almost 2,300 servers exposed online that were runningetcd, which is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines.
Source: securityaffairs.co
This past week, a New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site. While scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.
This post describes a recent attack Minerva’s research team dissected, dubbed GhostMiner, after our solution prevented this infection at a customer site. It provides an example of how malicious miners are evolving to use advanced fileless techniques to succeed in mining Monero and spreading silently on a global scale. In this attack, we also witnessed how competing miners are fighting each other to generate more income for themselves, removing other miners on the endpoint.
As the FBI pushes once again for backdoors in consumer encryption products, the State Department is apparently taking advantage of a $50 per iPhone unlocking product from Grayshift, a company with an ex-Apple engineer on its staff.
Source: vice.com
The US military is working on an experimental laser technology that could create the sound of voices out of thin air by altering atoms. The US military’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program, or JNLWD, thinks it can achieve this goal in the next few years.
Source: interestingengineering.com
Two years ago, when we began taking on blockchain security engagements, there were no tools engineered for the work. No static analyzers, fuzzers, or reverse engineering tools for Ethereum.
Source: trailofbits.com
Roy Jones says he got no training on how to handle issues that might inflame the Chinese government. “My job isn’t to decide whether Tibet is a country. I’m a customer care rep in Omaha, Nebraska,” he said.
Source: omaha.com
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, many Facebook users have been downloading their Facebook posts. And some of them are finding call and text-message logs from 2015 through 2017, although not the actual content of the calls or texts.
Source: tomsguide.com
Over the past few months, I’ve been monitoring the proliferation of exploits for some of my disclosed WordPress Plugin and Joomla Extension vulnerabilities against Akamai customers. I started this observation process which leads to an expected conclusion – severe vulnerabilities like SQL Injection, RFI and LFI would receive the most attention for any CMS platform. While less severe vulnerabilities such as XSS and path disclosure would likely receive less attention from the attackers.
Two vulnerabilities were reported and fixed in Kubernetes two weeks ago. The GitHub issues discussing the vulnerabilities and fixes were vague, so in this post I will review the bugs in additional detail and suggest remediation methods.
Source: twistlock.com
You get two for the price of one with today’s paper! Firstly, it’s a fascinating insight into the ransomware business and how it operates, with data gathered over a period of two years. Secondly, since ransomware largely transacts using Bitcoin, the methods used by the research team to uncover and trace ransomware activity are also of interest in their own right.
Source: acolyer.org
Regional news sources report South Korea’s financial authorities are working on legislation to formally allow initial coin offerings (ICOs) in an effort to appear more welcoming to the larger financial technology community.
Source: bitcoin.com
France plans to create a legal framework for raising funds via cryptocurrencies and aims to become a leading center for offerings in bitcoin-style digital currencies, its finance minister wrote on a news website.
Source: reuters.com
In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto designed Bitcoin to align the incentives of computers. In 2018, we are building multi-billion dollar blockchain projects, incentivizing humans using the same principles. We are assuming the efficient market hypothesis and the wisdom of the crowds.
But what happens when the crowds are not thatwise?
Source: medium.com
Because of this failure, U.S. and foreign police will have new mechanisms to seize data across the globe. Because of this failure, your private emails, your online chats, your Facebook, Google, Flickr photos, your Snapchat videos, your private lives online, your moments shared digitally between only those you trust, will be open to foreign law enforcement without a warrant and with few restrictions on using and sharing your information. Because of this failure, U.S. laws will be bypassed on U.S. soil.
According to a report from Atlanta NBC affiliate WXIA, a city employee sent the station a screen shot of a ransomware message demanding a payment of $6,800 to unlock each computer or $51,000 to provide all the keys for affected systems. Employees received emails from the city’s information technology department instructing them to unplug their computers if they noticed anything suspicious. An internal email shared with WXIA said that the internal systems affected include the city’s payroll application.