Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category
Tried checking under the sofa? Indian BTC exchange Coinsecure finds itself $3.5m lighter
Indian Bitcoin exchange Coinsecure has mislaid 438.318 BTC belonging to its customers. In a statement by parent firm Secure Bitcoin Traders Pvt, posted late on Thursday, the biz said its chief security officer had extracted a bunch of Bitcoin to distribute to punters – and discovered the funds were “lost in the process.” The vanished […]
Do you have a browser based bitcoin wallet? Check you’re not hacked if it’s JavaScript based
A significant number of past and current cryptocurrency products contain a JavaScript class named SecureRandom(), containing both entropy collection and a PRNG. The entropy collection and the RNG itself are both deficient to the degree that key material can be recovered by a third party with medium complexity. There are a substantial number of variations […]
‘Being cash-free puts us at risk of attack’: Swedes turn against cashlessness
Most consumers already say they manage without cash altogether, while shops and cafes increasingly refuse to accept notes and coins because of the costs and risk involved. Until recently, however, it has been hard for critics to find a hearing. “The Swedish government is a rather nice one, we have been lucky enough to have […]
Hacker Uses Exploit to Generate Verge Cryptocurrency out of Thin Abir
An unknown attacker has exploited a bug in the Verge cryptocurrency network code to mine Verge coins at a very rapid pace and generate funds almost out of thin air. The Verge development team is preparing a hard-fork of the entire cryptocurrency code to fix the issue and revert the blockchain to a previous state […]
The Lottery Hackers
That’s when it hit him. Right there, in the numbers on the page, he noticed a flaw—a strange and surprising pattern, like the cereal-box code, written into the fundamental machinery of the game. A loophole that would eventually make Jerry and Marge millionaires, spark an investigation by a Boston Globe Spotlight reporter, unleash a statewide […]
Tesla’s Amazon Cloud Account Hacked to Mine Cryptocurrency
An unidentified hacker or hackers broke into a Tesla-owned Amazon cloud account and used it to “mine” cryptocurrency, security researchers said. The breach also exposed proprietary data for the electric carmaker. The researchers, who worked for RedLock, a 3-year-old cybersecurity startup, said they discovered the intrusion last month while trying to determine which organization left […]
Crooks opt for Monero, paypal, ebay and gamesfor laundering
“Platforms like Monero are designed to be truly anonymous, and tumbler services like CoinJoin can [further] obscure transaction origins,” said Dr Mike McGuire, senior lecturer in criminology at Surrey University and author of the study. Many cybercriminals are using virtual currency to convert the illegal proceeds of crime into hard cash and assets. Digital payment […]
Can AMD Vulnerabilities Be Used to Game the Stock Market?
On Tuesday, a little known security company claimed to have found vulnerabilities and backdoors in some AMD processors. Within some parts of the security community, the story behind the researchers’ discovery quickly became more interesting than the discovery itself. The researchers, who work for CTS Labs, only reported the flaws to AMD shortly before publishing […]
Phishing and Attempted Stealing Incident on Binance VIA / BTC coins not only stopped, but costs hackers money
On Mar 7, UTC 14:58-14:59, within this 2 minute period, the VIA/BTC market experienced abnormal trading activity. Our automatic risk management system was triggered, and all withdrawals were halted immediately. This was part of a large scale phishing and stealing attempt. So far: All funds are safe and no funds have been stolen. The hackers […]
If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.
The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment. […] The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 […]
Glitch on Bitcoin Exchange Drops Prices to Zero Dollars, User Tries to Make Off With Trillions
Zaif, A cryptocurrency exchange in Japan reportedly experienced a temporary glitch last week that suddenly offered investors their pick of coins for the low, low price of zero dollars. Several customers took advantage of the opportunity, but one really ran with it. According to Reuters, it was possible to buy cryptocurrencies for free on the […]
Tesla accused of knowingly selling defective vehicles in new lawsuit
A former Tesla employee claims the company knowingly sold defective cars, often referred to as “lemons,” and that he was demoted and eventually fired after reporting the practice to his superiors. He made these allegations in a lawsuit filed in late January in New Jersey Superior Court under the Conscientious Employee Protection Act (CEPA).The former […]
Coinbase empies bank accounts without consent
Digital currency exchange Coinbase said it inadvertently charged punters for transactions they never made, effectively draining money from their bank accounts. It has promised to refund the money taken. For the last few days, netizens have been complaining that funds had vanished from bank accounts linked to Coinbase without reason. Some people report multiple charges […]
Koinz Trading Bitcoin mining pyramid game enters receivership
At least 60 people fall for Koinz Trading, that claimed to buy and run a BTC miner for you for the price of EUR 6100 + EUR 23 per month. Payments stopped in September. Rumor has it that the founder Barry van Mourik was selling the computers to pay for his debts. Zeker zestig gedupeerden […]
LoopX Startup Pulls ICO Exit Scam and Disappears with $4.5 Million
A cryptocurrency startup named LoopX has pulled an exit scam after collecting around $4.5 million from users during an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) held for the past weeks. The LoopX team disappeared out of the blue at the start of the week when it took down its website and deleted its Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube […]
At least 4200 popular and large websites hijacked by hidden crypto-mining code after popular plugin pwned
Thousands of websites around the world – from the UK’s NHS and ICO to the US government’s court system – were today secretly mining crypto-coins on netizens’ web browsers for miscreants unknown. The affected sites all use a fairly popular plugin called Browsealoud, made by Brit biz Texthelp, which reads out webpages for blind or […]
The gender pay gap at Uber is small and has a reason
Specifically, the study stated, drivers who make runs for Uber more frequently are more likely to know where and when to operate in order to get the highest-paying fares. Thus, because women, on average, spend less time driving for Uber than their male counterparts, they are less likely to be around to grab the highest-paying […]
Japanese cryptocurrency exchange loses more than $500 million to hackers
Coincheck said that around 523 million of the exchange’s NEM coins were sent to another account around 3 a.m. local time (1 p.m. ET Thursday), according to a Google translation of a Japanese transcript of the Friday press conference from Logmi. The exchange has about 6 percent of yen-bitcoin trading, ranking fourth by market share […]
Hackers Hijacking CPUs to Mine Cryptocurrency Have Now Invaded YouTube Ads
As Ars Technica first reported on Friday, users on social media started complaining earlier this week that YouTube ads were triggering their anti-virus software. Specifically, the software was recognizing a script from a service called CoinHive. The script was originally released as a sort of altruistic idea that would allow sites to make a little […]
Security Breaches Don’t Affect Stock Price. Or don’t they?
Abstract: This report assesses the impact disclosure of data breaches has on the total returns and volatility of the affected companies’ stock, with a focus on the results relative to the performance of the firms’ peer industries, as represented through selected indices rather than the market as a whole. Financial performance is considered over a […]
Crypto-cash exchange BitConnect pulls plug amid Bitcoin bloodbath
Amid a cryptocurrency price correction that has seen the price of Bitcoin drop by half from its mid-December peak, UK-based cyber-cash lending and exchange biz BitConnect said it is shutting down. The firm, dogged by accusations that it is a Ponzi scheme, cited bad press, regulatory orders, and cyber attacks for its market exit this […]
Wall Street Analysts Are Embarrassingly Bad At Predicting The Future, Study Finds
The researchers looked at a database of long-term growth forecasts made for all domestic companies listed on a major stock exchange. The forecasts are made in December each year, and predict how well a company’s stocks will do over the next three to five years. From 1981 to 2016, they found that the top 10 […]
Major Cryptocurrency Index Excludes Korean Prices Without Warning, creates apparent drop in prices
CoinMarketCap, arguably the most prominent global index of cryptocurrency prices, triggered a wave of anxiety and anger this morning when it removed a group of Korean cryptocurency exchanges from its price calculations.Though the change was apparently made at midnight Sunday U.S. EST, CoinMarketCap did not publicize it until midday on Monday, saying that the Korean […]
Chrome Extension with 100,000 Users Caught Pushing Cryptocurrency Miner
A Chrome extension with over 105,000 users has been deploying an in-browser cryptocurrency miner to unsuspecting users for the past few weeks.The extension does not ask for user permission before hijacking their CPUs to mine Monero all the time the Chrome browser is open.Named “Archive Poster,” the extension is advertised as a mod for Tumblr […]
The Founder of Litecoin Says He No Longer Owns Any Litecoin
“[W]henever I tweet about Litecoin price or even just good or bads news, I get accused of doing it for personal benefit. Some people even think I short LTC! So in a sense, it is conflict of interest for me to hold LTC and tweet about it because I have so much influence,” Lee, who […]
