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The FBI Motto: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity Her fidelity I can’t speak to . . . whatever bravery she had when she blew the whistle on stupid-headquarters-tricks has long past . . . and as far as integrity, well, read on (from Captain’s Quarters): […] former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley […] has descended far…
Siobhan Gorman blazes a trail through Ft. Meade: A program that was supposed to help the National Security Agency pluck out electronic data crucial to the nation’s safety is not up and running more than six years and $1.2 billion after it was launched, according to current and former government officials. The classified project, code-named…
From LGF: Search Engine: Google – Search Term: Tiananmen What the Chinese see What the rest of the world sees
Yeah, get some! You might not agree with their positions, but you can’t argue with the quality of their content.
They’re coming to take the waters: Mexican federal agents have arrested four Iraqis trying to sneak into the United States without proper documents, the government said Monday. […] Many undocumented Iraqi nationals have been captured in Mexico en route to the U.S. border. None has been found to have had any links to terrorism.
William Arkin points out an interesting set of coincidences: The National Security Agency is in the process of building a new warning hub and data warehouse in the Denver area, realigning much of its workforce from Ft. Meade, Maryland to Colorado. On the surface, the NSA move seems to be a management and cost cutting…
Reuters opens the back door (draft) – (thanks E.D.): The U.S. Army has forced about 50,000 soldiers to continue serving after their voluntary stints ended under a policy called “stop-loss,” but while some dispute its fairness, court challenges have fallen flat. The policy applies to soldiers in units due to deploy for the…
DOJ PAO explains what all the fuss is about.
My Weekly Standard article is up. Thanks Steve, R, C, and of course WK. Pre-emptive note to the CF community: Yes, if this were going to the IJDE it would read a lot differently. Consider who the average WS reader is. I’m on the HTCIA listserv if you want to discuss technology/technique.
I spent a brief but memorable time in West Texas many years ago. Unlike a lot of my cohorts I never made a weekend trip south of the border; in part because I’m not all that interested in donkey shows, and because I had a bad experience with tequila once that haunts me to this…
In case I needed to paint a bolder and more colorful picture of what one can find on captured media . . . from crypto/privacy guru Bruce Schneier in Wired: Some years ago, I left my laptop computer on a train from Washington to New York. Replacing the computer was expensive, but at the…
Computerworld’s EiC weighs in on a COMPUSEC issue: Computerworld‘s Jaikumar Vijayan reported that the DHS is spending $1.24 million on a project designed to improve the security of open-source software (“DHS Funds Effort to Find Flaws in Open-source,” Jan. 16). The money is being paid to Stanford University, Symantec and source-code analysis vendor Coverity to…
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, yesterday said that four British diplomats accused of espionage in Moscow should not be expelled, as their replacements might be cleverer than they were and harder to catch.
Part two of the CNSN story on how NSA deals with percieved malcontents here. Sad.
It may have been the delirium of being woken up several times in the night by a crying newborn, or it might have been just normal run-of-the-mill delirium, but if I’m not mistaken Matt Lauer started off the 07:00 hour of the Today Show with a line about the Administration playing the “name game” with…
Scammers who ransacked cryptocurrency projects to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in recent months have been able to carry out such heists by taking advantage of a central tenet of decentralized financial services. While DeFi projects promise to enable more efficiency in crypto transactions, much of the code undergirding the software is public,…
In prepared remarks delivered at the Practising Law Institute’s “SEC Speaks” program on September 8, Chair Gensler emphasized and reiterated his long-standing position that the vast majority of cryptocurrency tokens are securities, and he noted that “only a small number of tokens, even though they may represent a significant portion of the crypto market’s aggregate…
It’s a big week for Ethereum: Its big merge is set for Thursday, and investors could see big price movement when it happens. This major network upgrade will see Ethereum transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. The upgrade will address concerns about its environmental impact and dramatically improve its transaction speed, among other improvements, according to…
The brother of a former Coinbase Global Inc product manager pleaded guilty on Monday to a wire fraud conspiracy charge, in what US prosecutors have called the first insider trading case involving cryptocurrency. Nikhil Wahi, 26, admitted during a virtual court hearing before US district judge Loretta Preska in Manhattan that he made trades based…
At the end of August, the FBI issued a public service announcement on the susceptibility for cybercrime in DeFi (decentralized finance), the growing crypto segment of financial applications backed by blockchain technology. Of the $1.3 billion stolen in cryptocurrencies in the first three months of 2022, 97% came from DeFi platforms. The warning did nothing to…
Despite the Ethereum Merge being touted as a major upgrade to the blockchain network, its transition to proof-of-stake theoretically makes it more vulnerable to exploit. Speaking to Cointelegraph, the security researcher explained that unlike proof-of-work (PoW) systems, a proof-of-stake (PoS) system informs node validators in advance what blocks they will validate, thus enabling them to plan…
A malicious campaign conducted by the North Korean threat actor Lazarus Group targeted energy providers around the world between February and July 2022. The campaign was previously partially disclosed by Symantec and AhnLab in April and May, respectively, but Cisco Talos is now providing more details about it. Writing in an advisory on Thursday, the security researchers…
Popular YouTuber Scuba Jake has confirmed the hacking of his channel with over 13 million subscribers and 1.75 billion views since the channel’s creation in 2011. The September 9 incident saw crypto scammers take over the channel and attempt to defraud unsuspecting followers in a fake giveaway involving Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). An analysis…
Many traders frequently express some relatively large misconceptions about trading cryptocurrency futures, especially on derivatives exchanges outside the realm of traditional finance. The most common mistakes involve futures markets’ price decoupling, fees and the impact of liquidations on the derivatives instrument. Let’s explore three simple mistakes and misconceptions that traders should avoid when trading crypto…
The Biden administration has pointed, with alarm, to the national security implications of both cybersecurity and cryptocurrency. It’s just a matter of time before the government begins worrying about their intersection—cryptocurrency security. All of the United States’ international adversaries are in the business of exploiting bad cybersecurity, and many of them monetize their exploits using…
Quantum computing has raised concerns about the future of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in recent years. For example, it is commonly assumed that very sophisticated quantum computers will one day be able to crack present-day encryption, making security a serious concern for users in the blockchain space. The SHA-256 cryptographic protocol used for Bitcoin network security…
I explore the remarkable number of failures in cryptocurrency security for Lawfare. I argue that security really is worse for cryptocurrency, because the decentralization that proponents treasure makes it hard to safely disclose and fix security holes: Software security flaws … are ubiquitous in digital products. Like writers who can’t see their own typos, most coders…
The White House today suggested that U.S. lawmakers and regulators could soon crack down on cryptocurrency mining because of its large carbon footprint. In a Thursday report, mandated by President Biden in an executive order in March, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said crypto miners should reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with…
In an ironic twist, Rug Pull Finder (RPF), a nonfungible token (NFT) watchdog focused on identifying Web3-based fraud, has fallen victim to a smart contract exploit of its own. According to the NFT investigator’s post on Twitter on Friday, two people exploited a technical flaw in the project during the free mint stage — pilfering…
As Axie Infinity creator Sky Mavis works to further decentralize its Ronin network—a custom Ethereum sidechain designed for NFT-powered games—the Web3 startup has tapped one of the largest Web2 tech giants to help its cause. Today, Sky Mavis announced that it has reached an agreement with Google Cloud that will see the cloud computing division of…
At an industry conference today, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chief Gary Gensler said that he supports handing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) the power to “oversee and regulate crypto nonsecurity tokens and related intermediaries.” Gensler stressed that should Congress give the CFTC prime oversight over crypto, his own federal agency shouldn’t be overlooked.…
Scammers in recent weeks have employed up fake cryptocurrency web pages to attempt to steal money from users, the latest tactic to emerge in what’s already been a costly year for crypto-related hacks. The sham websites – which masquerade as pages for popular services such as Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken and MetaMask – aim to dupe visitors…
Security researchers have linked a new cyber espionage campaign targeting U.S., Canadian and Japanese energy providers to the North Korean state-sponsored Lazarus hacking group. Threat intelligence company Cisco Talos said Thursday that it has observed Lazarus — also known as APT38 — targeting unnamed energy providers in the United States, Canada and Japan between February and…
A group of cryptocurrency investors sued the Treasury Department on Thursday to block government sanctions that bar Americans from Tornado Cash, a popular crypto platform that criminals have used to launder virtual currencies. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Western District of Texas, is funded by the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which has clashed with…
U.S. authorities have seized more than $30 million in cryptocurrency plundered from an online game this year by hackers linked to North Korea, one of the largest successes clawing back digital revenue from Pyongyang, investigators said. While only a fraction of the hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency purloined, the sum recovered is far higher than previously…
Chatter on the cryptographic side of cryptocurrency has been growing over the past couple of years about the threat posed by quantum computing, an entirely new type of computer that would be many orders of magnitude more powerful than current ones — so powerful that many modern forms of encryption will be crackable.Including the cryptography…
Hours after the closing of Bill Murray’s NFT auction that raised 119.2 ETH (around $185,000) for charity Thursday, a hacker stole the funds. The hacker started to drain Murray’s personal wallet at around 7:00 p.m. ET on Thursday, according to on-chain data from Etherscan and details from Murray’s team. The unknown individual also attempted to…
Financial regulators in South Korea want to bring security tokens, which are blockchain-based digital forms of traditional securities, into the scope of the country’s capital markets rules in an effort to formalize the products. The country’s top financial regulators, including the Financial Services Commission (FSC) and Financial Supervisory Service, met with industry representatives like the…
A newly discovered cyberattack panel dubbed TeslaGun has been discovered, used by Evil Corp to run ServHelper backdoor campaigns. Data gleaned from an analysis by the Prodraft Threat Intelligence (PTI) team shows the Evil Corp ransomware gang (aka TA505 or UNC2165, along with half a dozen other colorful tracking names) has used TeslaGun to carry out…
Bitcoin traded below $19,000 on Wednesday morning, hitting its lowest level since June following a drop in stock markets globally and the continued strength of the U.S. dollar. The value of the entire cryptocurrency market also fell below $1 trillion as digital coins across the board saw a sell-off. Bitcoin was last trading slightly lower…
Crypto exchanges must report suspected sanctions breaches to UK authorities under new rules brought in amid concerns that bitcoin and other cryptoassets are being used to dodge restrictions imposed in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Official guidance was updated on 30 August to explicitly include “cryptoassets” among those that must be frozen if sanctions are…
According to reports, the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission is looking to switch up the country’s legal framework for cryptocurrencies. The main concern is that the bill in question does not consider tokens as digital assets or securities, which means that it does not fall under SEC regulation. Subsequently, the updated position of the Brazilian…
According to one of the most recent reports by a data analysis platform Chainanalysis, vulnerabilities in cross-chain bridge protocols have posed the biggest security threat in the crypto industry; they now represent two-thirds of all hacks. According to a blockchain security firm SlowMist Hacked, users lost around $263 million worth of cryptocurrency to hacks in…
A major stablecoin issuer is formulating an intricate plan to ensure it always remains beyond the reach of centralised authority after US regulators froze USDC (USDC-USD) funds without warning. The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, (OFAC) strong-armed USDC issuer Circle into freezing over 75,000 USDC in the wake of the Tornado Cash affair.…
After many delays, the long-hyped ‘Ethereum Merge’ is about to happen. The first stage of the process – Bellatrix – happens today, 6 September. The second stage – Paris – completes at some point next week. At that point, the way Ethereum – the world’s second largest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin – fundamentally works will change,…