There are early signs of a new ransomware outbreak, currently affecting a large number of countries across the globe, such as the UK, Ukraine, India, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, and others. This ransom uses the contact details of wowsmith123456@posteo.net and asks for a payment of $300 in Bitcoin.

At the time of writing, the ransomware outbreak is smaller than WannaCry, but the volume is “considerable,” according to Costin Raiu, Kaspersky Labs researcher, and MalwareHunter, an independent security researcher.

Australia’s top securities regulator believes central bank-issued cryptocurrencies could one day throttle illicit bitcoin use, and that initial coin offerings (ICOs) will remain largely outside the scope of global regulators.

Mobile ransomware is on the rise as a report released yesterday has noted a dramatic increase in 2017 compared to years past.

Nvidia will release graphic cards specifically designed for cryptocurrency mining through its partners, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The company’s shares have more than tripled in the last year, in part because of demand for digital currency mining.

One of the world’s largest technology hardware makers has announced new graphics cards (GPUs) aimed at the cryptocurrency mining market.

Taiwan-based manufacturer Asus revaeled the Mining RX 470 and Mining P106, which were designed to handle the energy and heat intensive process of mining. Though not expressly pitched as such, the release is undoubtedly aimed at capturing some of the interest in mining ethereum. Bitcoin mining, by comparison, has evolved to a stage in which application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, are required to compete.

Victims lost $1.33 billion to cyber criminals in 298,728 cases, with hackers stealing and extorting $28.3 million in cryptocurrencies in 2016.

Unocoin, one of India’s largest bitcoin exchanges, late Monday night said it had gone offline after it discovered a security vulnerability on its servers on Friday.

It is expected to be back online “end of day Tuesday,” Sathvik Vishwanath, CEO and cofounder, Unocoin, said in a statement. The vulnerability was a result of a server migration that took place two weeks earlier, he said.

The company, which claims to be India’s leading bitcoin company, emphasised that all customer funds were safe and secure but still made it mandatory for users to change their passwords. The specifications of the defect or the reasons on why it took so long for the flaw to be identified were not disclosed.

Several security researchers have spotted a new Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) portal over the weekend that lets anyone generate their own ransomware executable just by filling in three form fields and pressing a button.

The entry level for this new ransomware is hilariously low, compared to similar RaaS portals we’ve seen in the past.

The ransomware generated through this service is written in Go. We’ve called it Shifr based on the extension it adds to encrypted files, but G Data security researcher Karsten Hahn has told Bleeping Computer that an initial analysis of this new threat reveals clues that Shifr might be related to Trojan.Encoder.6491, the first ever ransomware written in Go, discovered last year by Dr.Web security researchers.

Posteo, the email provider where the Petya author is hosting an inbox to handle victims from today’s massive ransomware outbreak, has announced that it shut down the crook’s email account: wowsmith123456@posteo.net.

The German email provider’s decision is catastrophic news for Petya victims, as they won’t be able to email the Petya author in the case they want to pay the ransom to recover sensitive files needed for urgent matters.

The former operator of the now-defunct bitcoin exchange Coin.mx has been sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison.

The sentencing of Anthony Murgio comes months after he plead guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmission business in January. Murgio, along with alleged co-conspirator Yuri Lebedev, was first arrested and charged in the summer of 2015. Federal prosecutors later unveiled new charges against Murgio in November of that year

Coin.mx was a Florida-based bitcoin exchange that federal prosecutors alleged acted as a financial conduit for the laundered proceeds of online criminal activity. The government sought as many as 10 years in jail for Murgio, a figure that the defense pushed back against earlier this month.

When Brave, a privacy-­focused Internet browser company, decided to raise money this May, it could have gone a traditional route by borrowing money or selling equity to investors. Instead it chose a third way: an initial coin ­offering, or ICO.
Like an initial public offering, an ICO lets a firm raise capital from multiple sources. But rather than issuing shares of ownership, the offering company sells digital tokens, or “coins,” created through blockchain technology. In Brave’s ICO, the startup raised $35 million from about 130 investors—in less than a minute.
Boosters believe that strategies like Brave’s could be the future of investing, a transformative approach to fundraising that enables consumers to benefit more directly from the popularity of new technologies than they would if they owned a traditional stock. Critics, meanwhile, fret that ICOs occupy a regulatory gray area that could leave investors vulnerable to fraud and land startups in legal trouble. And at this early stage in ICO history, both sides may be right.

In short, ethereum is, without a doubt, a much more exciting blockchain than bitcoin. It’s like comparing an operating system to a paper ledger. But that doesn’t make it a better investment.

So, what is ether’s value proposition today?

It’s unused (and arguably not quite usable yet) as a general transaction currency; it’s too uncertain to be trusted as a secure store of wealth; and it has a derived value that appears almost entirely dependent on legally dubious ICOs that can’t go on forever. Ether as a currency, I fear, is misunderstood by many, and compared to bitcoin at least, substantially more risky and overvalued.

ISLAMABAD: Financial crises during the last two decades have shattered confidence in global currencies. Notable examples include Mexican peso during Tequila crisis of 1994, Thailand Baht and Malaysian ringgit in the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the United States dollar in global financial crisis of late-2008 and most recently Euro during Greek sovereign debt crisis. All of these currencies lost value in double digits at the peak of their respective financial crisis. As is often the case, crisis begets opportunity.

A crypto currency by the name of Bitcoin was launched in 2009 by an unknown person using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. Being a decentralised currency, Bitcoin transactions do not involve any financial intermediary like banks and no central authority like State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has any sway over it. Since its launch, Bitcoin has received a lot of attention. The value of one Bitcoin has soared to $2,679.70, which is equivalent to Rs280,939. Public policy makers in advanced economies are contemplating on how to integrate Bitcoin within the ambit of their monetary policies.

However, developing countries like Pakistan where rupee is so prone to volatility due to shaky confidence; the concept of Bitcoin has valuable utility for policy makers. In framing monetary policy particularly, some of the characteristics of Bitcoin are worth mimicking. These characteristics can augment monetary policy of Pakistan in achieving its objectives of ensuring stability of the value of rupee and fuller utilisation of the country’s productive resources.

BTCC, the company behind the longest-running Bitcoin exchange, has launched its first pure cryptocurrency exchange, BTCC DAX, and has introduced Bitcoin/Ethereum Classic as the first trading pair.

Back in 2015, when the issue of increasing transaction throughput was submitted for review, the framing was off. People had talked about the block size limit even since before Satoshi actually added the 1MB limit originally in 2010.
But the framing was off given all the new technological innovation that had taken place since then! (I’ll get back to this later)
I wrote in my previous piece that since 2010, a number of soft forks have been deployed successfully, employing a series of mechanisms that were increasing in sophistication. By the middle of 2015, there had been mastery of techniques for adding a bunch of new features at the Bitcoin consensus layer while preserving backwards compatibility and not disrupting the functioning of the network.

The AML4 (Directive 2015/859 UE) was introduced in Italy with its publication in the Italian Official Journal of the Legislative Decree 25th  May 2017, n. 90 (G.U. n. 140 of 19th June 2017) with the total reform of the legislative decree 231/2007.

The European Parliament has not yet approved the modification of AML4 with provisions regarding virtual currency (which will probably occur after discussion in plenary in late October 2017) but Italy anticipates some provisions, including Exchanger as an obliged entity for AML purposes.

We’ve developed a new tool for paid crowdsourcing that we call a social task. It’s a quick way to pay one or many people to complete a task by generating a public link that you can send in an email or post on social media.