Blockchain-based intelligence company TRM Labs has announced a $70 million expansion to its Series B funding round, bringing the total raised to $130 million, announced the company on Nov. 9. Among the world's largest private equity firms, Series B investor Thoma Bravo manages more than $122 billion in assets. The round was led by Thoma Bravo, with Goldman Sachs and previous TRM investors PayPal Ventures, Amex Ventures and Citi Ventures participating. The expansion follows TRM’s $60 Million Series B raise in December 2021 led by Tiger Global. Funds will support product development and talent acquisition to deliver accessible tools to …

Bug bounty platform Immunefi has released its Whitehat Leaderboard — a scoring system that showcases the top 20 most elite white hats in Web3. The rank will measure a given white hat's skills and status amid Immunefi's security community, said the company at the Web Summit on Nov 4. A white hat hacker is someone who identifies security vulnerabilities by testing an organization's information technology security. In Immunefi's community, the top 10 white hats alone have generated over $42 million in total earnings by disclosing critical vulnerabilities that have led to big bounty payments in the software industry. In the …

Third-party data breaches have exploded. The problem? Companies, including cryptocurrency exchanges, don’t know how to protect against them. When exchanges sign new vendors, most just innately expect that their vendors employ the same level of scrutiny as they do. Others don’t consider it at all. In today’s age, it isn’t just a good practice to test for vulnerabilities down the supply chain — it is absolutely necessary. Many exchanges are backed by international financiers and those new to financial technologies. Many are even new to technology altogether, instead backed by venture capitalists looking to get their feet wet in a …

An emergency update was released to all Lightning Network's LND node operators on Nov 1., after a critical bug caused LND nodes to fall out of sync chain. This was the second critical bug experienced by the network in less than a month. According to Lightning Labs, developer of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, some LND nodes stopped syncing due to an issue with the btcd wire parsing library. The hot fix (v.015.4) was released nearly three hours after the break. The release stated: "This is an emergency hot fix release to fix a bug that can cause lnd nodes to …

Reducing the amount of hacking by improving cybersecurity should be considered a top priority for the crypto industry, said Kim Grauer, director of research of blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis. As pointed out by the firm, this year could outpace 2021 in terms of crypto stolen through hacks. The vast majority of these exploits have been targeting the field of decentralized finance. “This can't go on in the industry because people are going to lose faith in investing in DeFi platforms”, Grauer said in an interview with Cointelegraph. Unlike centralized exchanges, which have improved their resiliency to crypto hacks, decentralized protocols …

Japan’s national police have pinned North Korean hacking group, Lazarus, as the organization behind several years of crypto-related cyber attacks. In the public advisory statement sent out on Oct. 14, Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA) and Financial Services Agency (FSA) sent a warning to the country's crypto-asset businesses, asking them to stay vigilant of “phishing” attacks by the hacking groupaimed at stealing crypto assets. The advisory statement is known as “public attribution,” and according to local reports, is the fifth time in history that the government has issued such a warning. The statement warns that the hacking group uses social …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) led cryptocurrency’s rapid growth in early 2021, but the crypto market has since plummeted in value. Global markets have played a role, but so has recklessness among developers when it comes to both cybersecurity and (often self-serving) inflationary token models. Too much DeFi has been based on tokens minted from nothing or tokens that finance other tokens at high interest rates, with no part of the entire activity having any real underlying economic activity to back the yields offered. Secondly, security issues, hacks and exploits of DeFi contracts and bridges have been widespread, and most notable DeFi …

A quick response from a number of blockchain security companies has helped facilitate the return of around 70% of the $23 million exploit of decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator Transit Swap. The DEX aggregator lost the funds after a hacker exploited an internal bug on a swap contract on Oct. 1, leading to a quick response from Transit Finance team along with security companies Peckshield, SlowMist, Bitrace and TokenPocket, who wer able to quickly work out the hacker’s IP, email address and associated-on chain addresses. It appears these efforts have already born fruit, as less than 24 hours after the hack, …

Uber is a staple of the gig economy, for better or worse, and a disruptor that once sent shockwaves throughout the mobility space. Now, however, Uber is being taken for a ride. The company is handling a reportedly far-reaching cybersecurity breach. According to the ride-hailing giant, the attacker has not been able to access sensitive user data, or at least, there is no evidence to suggest otherwise. Whether or not sensitive user data was exposed, this case points to a persistent issue with today’s apps. Can we continue to sacrifice our data — and thereby our privacy and security — …

United States Senators Marsha Blackburn and Cynthia Lummis have introduced proposed changes to a 2015 bill that would allow “voluntary information sharing of cyber threat indicators among cryptocurrency companies.” According to a draft bill on amending the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, Blackburn and Lummis suggested U.S. lawmakers allow companies involved with distributed ledger technology or digital assets to report network damage, data breaches, ransomware attacks, and related cybersecurity threats to government officials for possible assistance. Should the bill be signed into law, agencies including the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would issue …

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) have been heralded as the future of governance, unlocking a more egalitarian approach to decision-making. However, decentralizing leadership isn’t a magical solution that instantly leads to better results. To truly get the most out of a decentralized organization, steps must be taken to regulate weighted voting and tokenomics. If not carefully balanced, DAOs can implode — and some already have. Decentralized governance explained DAOs offer a model for managing a project or company that distributes voting rights across all members. There is usually no central authority, only the will of the collective. While this sounds equitable …

Today’s financial world is becoming increasingly digitized, and naturally, central banks want to adapt to the changing environment. The use of cash is rapidly declining. Globally, the rise of digital payment apps and COVID-19 have only accelerated the decline in cash usage, fueling interest in digital currencies and demand for easier payment solutions. As crypto adoption continues to expand, the idea of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) has also gained momentum. Governments across the world have been flirting with, and examining, the idea of issuing their own CBDCs, with a handful already launching. It isn’t clear when CBDCs will become …