Liquidity and volatility are two issues that dog almost every blockchain technology startup and cryptocurrency, which is why “stablecoins” are becoming popular. Backed by gold, oil, fiat, and other, more established currencies, assets, and utilities, stablecoins offer an interesting alternative to regular cryptocurrencies.
Source: venturebeat.com
Last Friday, reporters from The New York Times and The Observer of London told Facebook that Cambridge had retained copies of private data for about 50 million Facebook users. Facebook says Cambridge promised in 2015 that the data would be deleted. Facebook responded to the new revelations by banning Cambridge and several of its associates from Facebook.
Source: arstechnica.com
Chinese companies are taking advantage of America’s financially strapped higher-education system to buy schools, and the latest deal for a classical music conservatory in Princeton, New Jersey, is striking chords of dissonance on campus.
Source: bloomberg.com
The main concern for proponents of cryptocurrency is that regulation will be introduced in a way that will stifle innovation in the sector, as Hamel tweeted before the hearing. In China, a major hub for cryptocurrency innovation and infrastructure, the government has begun to ramp up a widespread clampdown on cryptocurrency. For example, last year the government restricted trading on exchanges, pushing market leaders OKCoin and Huobi to launch cryptocurrency-only sites, OKex and Huobi Pro respectively.
Hardware wallets like those sold by Ledger are designed to protect the user’s private keys from malicious software that might try to harvest those credentials from the user’s computer. The devices enable transactions via a connection to a USB port on the user’s computer, but they don’t reveal the private key to the PC.
Source: krebsonsecurity.com
Lightning is a scaling solution for distributed payment networks, originally proposed for the Bitcoin blockchain. Lightning is designed to allow users to make off-chain payments through routers and hubs. Lightning even has the potential to support cross-protocol payments, such as a payment where the sender sends Bitcoins on the Bitcoin network and the recipient receives lumens on the Stellar network, without having to trust any parties in between.
Telegram, founded by Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, has been fighting an effort by the FSB, the state’s security service formerly known as the KGB, which last year demanded that the company hand over its private encryption keys.
Source: zdnet.com
Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target bitcoin users around the world — andwielded at least one mysterious source of information to “help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins,” according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013. The data source appears to have leveraged the NSA’s ability to harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also exploiting an unnamedsoftware programthat purported to offer anonymity to users, according to other documents.
The travel booking site said about 880,000 payment cards were affected. According to the statement, the company found evidence in March that an attacker had access to the company’s legacy systems between October and December last year. It was during that time the hacker accessed customer data from the previous two years — between January 2016 and December 2017 — which included names, dates of birth, postal and email addresses, gender, and payment card information.
If the cave happened to be around the corner from the town library or a Starbucks, you might be in luck. Then, you could get help from something like Google PlaNet: a deep-learning machine that was initially trained on 126 million photos with EXIF data in order to learn how to work out the location of almost any photo, just going by its pixels, no EXIF data needed.
In this post, I’m going to discuss a vulnerability I discovered in Ledger hardware wallets. The vulnerability arose due to Ledger’s use of a custom architecture to work around many of the limitations of their Secure Element.
Source: saleemrashid.com
Dynamic analysis of iOS apps without JailbreakIn the article I will share my experience in solving some of the problems I faced when analyzing the security of iOS applications. All the tricks and approaches (if it is not listed separately) applicable on iOS device without Jailbreak.
Source: medium.com
The tool takes in a list of bucket names to check. Found S3 buckets are output to file. The tool will also dump or list the contents of ‘open’ buckets locally.
Source: github.com
Upon release, the company received instant criticism from the community at large for selling a ‘useless miner.’ The cryptographic algorithm it is designed for, CryptoNight, is mainly used by coins focused on privacy. Monero, the most widely used privacy coin based on CryptoNight, has already proclaimed it will tweak its technology to avoid being minable via the Antminer X3, hence the debate.
I’m saying this to emphasize the point that for some of us, that has always been the vision. One of the first burning questions I had when I was first introduced to Bitcoin was how the whole thing was supposed to scale. Concepts I’ve learned of since then—like SPV and pruning—helped, but I wasn’t completely satisfied.
Ever since I heard about channels and thought about how they could be used in a network, that would become one of the first things I would reference whenever discussions of scalability came up.
The Facebook’s co-founder and CEO lost $6.06 billion in stock value, according to CNBC, when reports that Cambridge Analytica, a firm hired by Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, improperly used the social network’s user data.
Source: fortune.com
This series of posts recounts how, in November 2016, we hunted for and took down Gooligan, the infamous Android OAuth stealing botnet. What makes Gooligan special is its weaponization of OAuth tokens, something that was never observed in mainstream crimeware before. At its peak, Gooligan had hijacked over 1M OAuth tokens in an attempt to perform fraudulent Play store installs and reviews.
Security firm Malwarebytes also obtained information on the device and wrote-up a technical post on the technology. Once the box has determined the password, it displays the code on the iPhone screen. Four-digit passcodes can take minutes to a few hours, but six-digit passcodes — now the default on iPhones — can take three days or longer to crack.
But that’s still a significantly shorter amount of time than other known phone-cracking techniques.
Once installed the malware will intercept mobile calls you attempt to make to your bank, and instead direct them to a scammer impersonating an agent working for the bank.
Source: grahamcluley.com
We just saw an interesting attack technique applied to one of our PostgreSQL servers. After logging into the database, the attacker continued to create different payloads, implement evasion techniques through embedded binaries in a downloaded image, extract payloads to disk and trigger remote code execution of these payloads. Like so many attacks we’ve witnessed lately, it ended up with the attacker utilizing the server’s resources for cryptomining Monero.