The Harmony layer-1 blockchain project team has offered a bounty equal to just 1% of the $100 million in crypto stolen from the Horizon Bridge hack last week. Harmony tweeted on June 26 that the team had committed $1 million for the return of the funds that were stolen from the Horizon Bridge on Thursday. It added, “Harmony will advocate for no criminal charges when funds are returned.” We commit to a $1M bounty for the return of Horizon bridge funds and sharing exploit information. Contact us at [email protected] or ETH address 0xd6ddd996b2d5b7db22306654fd548ba2a58693ac. Harmony will advocate for no criminal charges …

Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis has launched a hotline that will accept reports o incidents of hackers demanding cryptocurrency payments from platforms or companies. In a Wednesday blog post, Chainalysis said its "Crypto Incident Response" hotline would operate 24/7 for victims of a “hack, ransomware attack, code exploit or flash loan attack” in which “cryptocurrency funds are either demanded or stolen.” The company attributed the launch of the reporting service on crypto-related ransomware attacks presenting “national security concerns” as well as potentially undermining confidence in the crypto industry. According to Chainalysis, hackers were responsible for the loss of more than $3 …

The U.S. thinktank Atlantic Council released a report Wednesday on cybersecurity issues related to central bank digital currencies (CBDC). The authors provide a generalized discussion of CBDC security, but with a clear focus on the United States and issues specific to it. They determined that the security risks presented by a CBDC depend heavily on its design, with performance, security and privacy being balanced variously in different designs. The report looked at six design options, only three of which are being considered or deployed in real life. Privacy was identified as the main risk from a CBDC for consumers. In …

One of the most popular crypto startups, OpenSea, has recently come under fire for stolen and plagiarized nonfungible tokens (NFTs). In light of the growing number of NFT scams, OpenSea has announced the launch of a new feature that will automatically hide suspicious NFT transfers from view on their marketplace. This will help to protect users from being scammed and ensure that only legitimate transactions are visible. According to a blog post on Monday, the new feature will automatically conceal suspicious NFT transfers to address key concerns around trust and safety on OpenSea. OpenSea has recently been focusing on enhancing …

The collection and processing of information was a major theme at the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC) hearing titled, “Rising Threats: Ransomware Attacks and Ransom Payments Enabled by Cryptocurrency” on Tuesday. The committee hosted a panel of private-sector experts who discussed the problem of ransomware attacks and the challenges of collecting and using the information necessary to fight them. Committee chair Gary Peters of Michigan, who introduced the Strengthening American Cybersecurity Act in February, said the government lacks sufficient data even to understand the scope of the threat posed by ransomware attacks. Attackers almost …

Another business jumps aboard the Bitcoin bandwagon. Octagon Networks, a global cybersecurity network company with over 20 employees announced on Monday that it had “finished the process of converting its liquid assets and entire balance sheet into Bitcoin (BTC).” The group will also “start accepting Bitcoin payments for all of our services, with a 50% discount when paid in Bitcoin.” Today, Octagon Networks becomes the first cybersecurity company to convert it's entire balance sheet into #Bitcoin. We will also start accepting payments in Bitcoin, and offering a discount to encourage the use of Bitcoin. Read More: https://t.co/32mcdlUEGu — Octagon Networks …

A mismatch in the reported price of underlying assets on synthetic assets decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Mirror Protocol has caused an ongoing exploit that has the potential to drain all of its funds. The exploit was observed on Sunday by governance participant Mirroruser on the protocol’s forum. As of the time of writing, the Mirror BTC (mBTC), Mirror Polkadot (mDOT), Mirror Ether (mETH) and Mirror Galaxy (mGLXY) synthetic asset pools on the protocol have lost almost all of their assets valued at over $2 million. Mirror allows trading of synthetic assets such as stocks and cryptocurrency on the Terra and …

Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis has released a new tool to track transactions across decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and multiple blockchains. Chainalysis launched a beta version of its Storyline software on Wednesday. Touted as a “Web3-native blockchain analysis tool,” Storyline aims to track and visualize smart contract transactions with a focus on nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and DeFi platforms. This is in line with the growing popularity and prevalence of NFTs and DeFi in the cryptocurrency space over the past year. Chainalysis provides blockchain analysis and annual reports on cryptocurrency crime trends and other analytics. The ever-changing landscape has seen DeFi and …

Ahead of Ethereum’s highly anticipated switch to proof-of-stake (PoS), cybersecurity firm Cloudflare is set to launch and fully stake Ethereum validator nodes over the next few months. It aims to study energy efficiency, consistency management and network speed of the PoS network as part of its commitment to environmental sustainability and to help “build a better internet.” Cloudflare was founded in 2010 and provides web security services such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation to protect clients from DDoS attacks. Cloudflare said it was experimenting with the “next generation of Web3 networks that are embracing proof of stake,” with Ethereum being …

The decentralized finance (DeFi) industry has lost over a billion dollars to hackers in the past couple of months, and the situation seems to be spiraling out of control. According to the latest statistics, approximately $1.6 billion in cryptocurrencies was stolen from DeFi platforms in the first quarter of 2022. Furthermore, over 90% of all pilfered crypto is from hacked DeFi protocols. These figures highlight a dire situation that is likely to persist over the long term if ignored. Why hackers prefer DeFi platforms In recent years, hackers have ramped up operations targeting DeFi systems. One primary reason as to …

Decentralized blockchain technology has been around for a relatively short period of time, in the grand scheme of things, but its decentralized nature has the power to keep data and information out of the hands of censors looking to create a “safe” and “faultless” version of history. Blockchain is permissionless and literally owned by no one. So, while we can’t save the Alexandria libraries of the past, we can make sure the future is well equipped with the tools necessary to preserve historical records. Here we’ll look at some of the ways nonfungible tokens (NFT) and blockchain technology have been …

Like most new-age networks, Solana was developed to resolve major issues confronting the blockchain industry. While the network has addressed some of these issues by its very nature, it has also encountered a few unique problems. From resource exhaustion to a halt in block confirmation, the Solana network has suffered a number of setbacks that resulted in repeated power outages, causing the network to shut down for hours on several occasions. The network went down on December 4, 2020, about three years after Solana was introduced, causing confusion in the community. The chain appears to have stopped validating new blocks …