Cryptocurrency

Businesses must constantly adjust to innovation. This year, American companies have incorporated new digital currency trends like never before. From cryptocurrency to AI, these offerings have revolutionized how employee payments operate.

Here are the top five trends in employee payments.

Researchers at F-Secure have uncovered a targeted, advanced attack on a cryptocurrency organization which they have linked to the Lazarus Group, and believe is part of a global, and financially motivated, hacking campaign.

Lazarus has been linked to the now infamous WannaCry attacks of 2017. This latest report identifies the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used during the attack, such as spearphishing via a service (in this case, using LinkedIn to send a fake job offer tailored to the recipient’s profile).

Overnight, Twitter suffered a massive attack by hackers who tried to use the verified accounts of celebrities and high-profile users to execute a Bitcoin scam. The likes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Kanye West had their accounts hijacked and message were posted promising that if people sent money to a Bitcoin wallet, they would get double the amount back.

Needless to say, it was a crypto scam, and Twitter took the extraordinary steps of preventing all users with a blue tick from tweeting. Twitter now has control of the situation and says that the attack came after staff fell victim to social engineering, enabling hackers to gain access to internal tools which were then used to take over key accounts.

British fintech firm Revolut has partnered with New York-based Paxos to bring Bitcoin and Ethereum trading to customers in the US.

Having only launched in the United States in March this year, Revolut is gradually bringing the services it already offers in Europe to its American user base. Thanks to the new partnership, residents of 49 states can now indulge in some crypto trading.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has been made a Visa principal member, making it "the first pure-play cryptocurrency company" to receive such accreditation. The membership was awarded back in December, but the news has only just been made public.

This is not the first time Coinbase has had dealings with Visa. The two companies worked together last year to launch the Coinbase Card ("a Visa debit card, funded by your Coinbase balance") in the UK, but now it will be possible to bring the debit card and additional services to more markets around the world.

When news broke that the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani had been killed in a drone strike ordered by Donald Trump, the value of Bitcoin jumped by 5 percent.

With tensions between Iran and the US now at an all-time high, the price surge is expected to continue. This is the belief of Nigel Green, the CEO and founder of deVere Group, one of the world’s largest independent financial services and advisory organizations, who says that the cryptocurrency is increasingly seen as being as safe as gold.

Revolut is coming to the US. The innovative fintech firm has teamed up with Mastercard, and plans to bring its extraordinarily useful multi-currency card to America.

The digital banking service has already enjoyed huge success in Europe through its existing partnerships with Mastercard and Visa. Revolut's particular strength lies in the ease with which money can be converted between currencies with not only no or very low fees but also at incredible exchange rates -- all accessible through a mobile app.

Security researchers at TrendMicro have discovered a rootkit-like strain of malware that is striking Linux users. Called Skidmap, the malware is a cryptocurrency miner, but there is much more to it than that.

Skidmap is clever. Very clever. It goes out of its way to disguise itself, going as far as faking system statistics to hide the tell-tale high CPU usage that might give it away. More than this, the Monero-mining malware can also give attackers unlimited access to an infected system.

Facebook's plans to venture into the world of cryptocurrencies has proved highly controversial, but the social media giant is plowing on regardless. The company and the partners it is working with on Libra have launched a public bug bounty program, offering pay-outs of up to $10,000 per bug.

Announced by the Libra Association, the aim of the Libra Bug Bounty Program is to "strengthen the security of the blockchain". The association wants to track down " security and privacy issues and vulnerabilities".

Facebook announced last month that it was launching its own Libra cryptocurrency. But the results of a new survey suggest that the social network is struggling to gain consumer trust in its system.

Messaging app Viber surveyed 2,000 people in the US and UK and finds that fewer than three percent of Americans and only 1.4 percent in the UK say they would be willing to try Libra for payments.

Last month $40 million worth of Bitcoin was stolen in the Binance hack and it's estimated that more than $3 billion has been stolen over the last 18 months due to key theft and stolen credentials.

In order to guard against this type of theft, new company Fireblocks is launching an enterprise platform to protect crypto currency and other digital assets in transit.

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has been struck by hackers who were able to make off with $40 million worth of Bitcoin.

The exchange suffered what it describes as a "large scale security breach" in which attackers were able to obtain "a large number of user API keys, 2FA codes, and potentially other info". CEO Zhao Changpeng says that 7,000 BTC were withdrawn in a single transaction and the attack which was perpetrated using a variety of methods.

Coinhive -- the controversial Monero mining service -- has announced that it is closing down.

The decision to shut up shop has been partly blamed on the dramatic drop in the value of the cryptocurrency. A huge slump in Monero's value, coupled with an impending hard fork of the cryptocurrency and an update to the mining algorithm, means that the service is no longer economically viable.

An increasing number of enterprises are considering pre-purchasing cryptocurrency in anticipation of potential ransomware attacks. But is this a valid risk-reduction strategy for enterprises?

To get some views on this controversial issue, we spoke with Mike Doran, senior security consultant with the enterprise incident management team at cybersecurity specialist Optiv, and former computer forensics examiner with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.

How do you know if you're reading tweets from a real person or a bot? As bot technology becomes more sophisticated it's increasingly hard to tell.

Researchers at Duo Security have collected and analyzed data from 88 million public Twitter accounts using machine learning to spot the tactics used by malicious bots to appear legitimate and avoid detection.