Articles about Cryptocurrency

The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has closed the account of the WikiLeaks Shop -- the official source of WikiLeaks merchandise -- citing violations of its terms of services.

WikiLeaks is not happy about this and is calling for a "global blockade" of Coinbase in protest, saying the exchange is an "unfit member of the crypto community". The WikiLeaks Shop has itself not been closed, and it is still able to accept Bitcoin payments -- just not via Coinbase.

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In a classic example of social engineering, well-known names from the BBC's Dragons' Den TV series and others are being used to advertise a cryptocurrency scam.

Websites claiming to offer cryptocurrency investments are using images and false recommendations from prominent individuals including Deborah Meaden and Peter Jones from Dragons' Den, and Martin Lewis, the founder of MoneySavingExpert.com, without their consent.

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We already know that cryptomining is currently flavor of the month among malware creators, but a new report released today by Malwarebytes puts some startling figures on the problem.

On consumer systems cryptomining detections were up a massive 4,000 percent in the last quarter, while ransomware detections fell 35 percent over the same period. For businesses cryptomining detections rose 27 percent this quarter and ransomware detections 28 percent. However, Spyware is still the cybercriminals' favourite choice, with over 80,000 detections in January alone.

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Verge may not be the biggest cryptocurrency out there, but it does have quite a following and has generated enough interest to attract hackers. The cryptocurrency came under attack for three hours yesterday, enabling a hacker to net 15.6 million Verge coins worth around $780,000.

There was initially speculation that Verge had fallen victim to a ">51% attack" -- in which an attacker is able to forge transactions by taking control of more than half of the network -- but this has been denied by developers. A hard fork is being prepared to patch the bug that allowed the attack to take place.

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Amid growing concern about a disregard for Chrome Web Store policies, Google is slapping a ban on extensions that mine for cryptocurrencies.

With immediate effect, no more cryptomining extensions will be added to the Store, and as of July 2018, any existing mining tools will be removed. Google says that an astonishing 90 percent of mining extensions ignore rules that state cryptomining must be the extension's sole purpose, and users need to be fully informed about the mining.

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The higher education sector has seen a big increase in cryptocurrency mining activity according to a new report from AI security company Vectra.

Vectra used its Cognito platform to monitor traffic and collect metadata from more than 4.5 million devices and workloads from customer cloud, data center and enterprise environments. It discovered that, of all the cryptocurrency mining detections, 60 percent occurred in higher education.

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Although it's relatively new, the cryptocurrency industry was the fifth most attacked by DDoS in the final quarter of 2017.

Imperva's latest Global DDoS Threat Landscape Report finds the spike in cryptocurrency prices has attracted the attention of attackers. Also the number of exchanges has increased to 190, up from 70 in Q3.

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Venezuela is the first country to create its own crytpocurrency, after it announced the oil-backed Petro last month. The coin, which is expected to make its debut on public exchanges in April, is highly controversial, and not for the usual reasons players in this market are frowned upon.

Critics say that Petro is used by the Venezuelan government to circumvent international sanctions, which is a serious-enough concern for the US government that President Trump decided to ban the use of Petro in the country.

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Just a few days ago, it was revealed that Google plans to ban ads for cryptocurrencies and related products and services later this year. Now it seems as though Twitter could be following suit.

The plans could see the social network implementing a ban on ads for ICOs and almost all cryptocurrencies. It is reported that Twitter's ban could come into force within a couple of weeks.

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The cryptocurrency market is going through a tough period right now. The cap is down significantly from the record high reached in January, Google is following Facebook in banning crypto ads and regulators are investigating ICOs, just to name a few of the problems that it's facing. However, there is some good news to report as well.

Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, today announces that it's received an e-money license in the UK, which allows it to provide payment services to its local users and, by extension, other EU customers as well.

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Google has announced that advertisements for cryptocurrencies will be banned from its platform starting in June. The ban not only covers currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, but also related products such as initial coin offerings, cryptocurreny exchanges and digital wallets.

The announcement came as Google is relying on new technology to detect and remove ads that violate policies. The company says it removed over 3.2 billion ads in 2017, and while it does not give a precise reason for the cryptocurrency ad ban, it says it is part of "improving the ads experience across the web."

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Just after offering up a bounty to track down the hackers who attacked it, cryptocurrency exchange Binance has announced the launch of a public blockchain.

Binance Chain, as it is known, is the exchange's vision of the future, and it will focus mainly on the transfer and trading of blockchain assets. Binance also announced that its own Binance Coin (BNB) will become a native coin, changing from the current Ethereum-based ERC20 token.

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Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has said that the blockchain technology behind cryptocurrencies could also be used to regulate them. She suggests that the IMF "fight fire with fire" in trying to address the "dark side of the crypto world."

While acknowledging the potential for the technology behind crypto-assets as being massively empowering -- particularly as a way to provide low-cost payment methods in poorer countries -- she says that cryptocurrencies also need regulation to avoid problems such as money laundering and funding terrorism.

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A week ago, cryptocurrency exchange Binance was the victim of a hacking attempt. While the attempt on March 7 is described as "not successful," Binance is still eager to track down the perpetrators.

So keen is the exchange, in fact, that it is offering up a $250,000 bounty to "the first person to supply substantial information and evidence that leads to the legal arrest of the hackers."

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Microsoft has stopped a large scale malware distribution campaign that tried to infect almost 500,000 Windows PCs with a cryptocurrency miner.

Windows Defender antivirus software detected 80,000 instances of several Trojans with the payload known as Dofoil or Smoke loader, at noon PST on March 6.

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