On Wednesday, the United States Department of Justice announced charges against three North Korean hacker. Making the announcement, Assistant Attorney General John Demers condemned the North Korean program, the most famous branch of which is Lazarus Group. Demers said: "North Korea’s operatives, using keyboards rather than guns, stealing digital wallets of cryptocurrency instead of sacks of cash, are the world’s leading bank robbers." With a country largely sequestered from the international economy, North Korea's hacking program has been a critical source of revenue. Many have linked hacking income from sources like the WannaCry malware and crypto exchange Coincheck with the …

Revenue from crypto-related crime dropped by more than half in 2020 according to Chainalysis’ annual report on the subject. Cybercriminals netted around $5 billion less than the $10 billion plus they got away with in 2019, representing a 53% fall. Transactions involving illicit funds have decreased even more rapidly than the total volume of those funds, falling from 2.1% of all transactions analyzed in 2019 down to just 0.34% last year. Among the eight categories of transactions deemed “illicit” by Chainalysis, the dollar amount of crypto taken in by scams decreased the most, by 71% to $2.6B, largely due to …

London-based cryptocurrency exchange Exmo suffered a distributed denial-of-service attack on Monday, causing the platform’s servers to become unavailable. In a tweet on Monday, Exmo reported that hackers had targeted the exchange with $75 million in trading volume in a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack. These cyberattacks typically overload a system with numerous requests from multiple virus-infected servers. Important: DDoS attack on EXMO ❗️ Please note the EXMO exchange website is now under the DDoS attack. The servers are temporarily unavailable. We are solving this issue right now. Please stay tuned. — EXMO (@Exmo_Com) February 15, 2021 The attack comes two …

Major decentralized finance protocol Yearn.Finance (YFI) has restored its yDAI vault in the aftermath of a $11 million exploit by hackers. Yearn announced Tuesday that they opened a Maker vault with YFI tokens from the treasury and minted 9.7 million DAI tokens from the vault to keep the yDAI vault intact. Using borrowed money allows the project to reimburse users without taking a hit to the treasury, either due to possible YFI appreciation or by gradually repaying the debt with protocol revenue. The team said that this is a one-off occurrence, as they expect users to hedge their own risks …

A whitehat hacker has seen what was already one of the largest smart contract-related bug bounties ever awarded more than double, after the ARMOR token price pumped following the announcement of his reward. On Feb. 3 ArmorFi announced that Alexander Schlindwein of Idea Markets had identified a critical bug in its smart contracts before the insurance brokerage platform went live. If left unpatched, the bug would have allowed a bad actor with just one dollar of coverage to drain the entirety of funds from ArmorFi’s underwriting contract. Schlindwein was awarded 1 million Armor tokens, worth about $700,000 at the time …

The year 2020 will go down in history for how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the Spanish economy. Beyond that, however, there have been important events from a governmental and regulatory point of view, as well as those related to private companies and the adoption of cryptocurrencies. Cointelegraph en Español is presenting you a summary of the events that marked last year as well as highlights from various representatives of the local crypto ecosystem and opinions on what the industry can expect in 2021. January Eurocoinpay asks the Spanish Minister of Economic Affairs to regulate cryptocurrency. February In an interview on …

Users of Indian crypto exchange BuyUCoin have reportedly been affected by a breach compromising personal data of more than 325,000 people. According to a report from Indian news outlet Inc42, a hacking group by the name of ShinyHunters leaked a database containing the names, phone numbers, email addresses, tax identification numbers and bank account details of more than 325,000 BuyUCoin users. However, a later report from Bleeping Computer shows the leaked data may only contain information from 161,487 BuyUCoin members. Cybersecurity researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia posted screenshots of the leaked data — recorded until September 2020 — to Twitter last week, …

In the 2013–2017 period, 29 hacks occurred in the Bitcoin market where a total of 1.1 million Bitcoin were stolen. Noting that the average price for Bitcoin (BTC) in December 2020 exceeded $20,000, the corresponding monetary equivalent of losses is more than $22 billion, which strongly highlights the societal impact of this criminal activity. What did crypto exchanges do to address this problem? Nowadays, about 90% of exchanges use some kind of cold storage system, which means that digital assets are stored offline. Keeping Bitcoin offline considerably reduces the threat from hacking attacks. Related: Roundup of crypto hacks, exploits and …

Authorities in Japan are reportedly targeting individuals for their alleged involvement in the January 2018 hack of the Coincheck crypto exchange. According to a Jan. 22 report from Japanese news outlet Nikkei Asia, police have arrested or referred roughly 30 people in Japan to the local prosecutors’ office for their alleged role in hacking one of the country’s cryptocurrency exchanges. In January 2018, hackers stole roughly $534 million worth of NEM (XEM) from Coincheck in what was — and still is — the largest hack of a crypto exchange. Nikkei Asia claims that according to an unnamed source, investigators "traced …

Origin Protocol, a DeFi stablecoin project, will begin accepting claims from users who were affected by a $7 million exploit that occurred back in November 2020. According to a blog post from Origin on Jan. 20, the project announced it will be making good on a December promise to compensate more than 700 victims of a $7 million flash loan attack on the protocol’s Origin Dollar (OUSD). In addition, Origin users who lost more than 1,000 OUSD can make a second transaction “to claim and stake OGN,” the protocol’s governance token. Though users who stake OGN will have their funds …

Researchers wishing to apply to New York-based Red Balloon Security have to complete an unusual technical interview as part of their application process: unlocking a hard drive containing crypto. According to a report from Business Insider, Red Balloon sends the hard drives to certain candidates for cybersecurity research positions at the firm. Anyone who has the “the skills and passion” to crack the encryption would be able to claim 0.1337 Bitcoin (BTC), or roughly $4,800 at the time of publication. Applicants who are able to access the coins are told to purchase a ticket to New York City for the …

Russian cryptocurrency exchange Livecoin has announced it is shutting down after abruptly halting operations in late December 2020. According to Livecoin’s main page, the exchange is unable to continue operations due to financial and technical damages caused by an alleged attack on its servers in late 2020. Livecoin announced the shutdown on Jan. 16 on Twitter, linking to its new domain “Livecoin.news.” Livecoin’s previous domain Livecoin.net is not available at publishing time. Livecoin said that it is looking to “pay the remaining funds” to its clients, asking users to contact the exchange via email to complete verification. In order to …