Blockchain | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Threat actors have been observed serving malicious code by utilizing Binance's Smart Chain (BSC) contracts in what has been described as the "next level of bulletproof hosting." The campaign, detected two months ago, has been codenamed  EtherHiding  by Guardio Labs. The novel twist marks the latest iteration in an ongoing malware campaign that leverages compromised WordPress sites to serve unsuspecting visitors a fake warning to update their browsers before the sites can be accessed, ultimately leading to the deployment of information stealer malware such as Amadey, Lumma, or RedLine. "While their initial method of hosting code on abused Cloudflare Worker hosts was taken down, they've quickly pivoted to take advantage of the decentralized, anonymous, and public nature of blockchain," security researchers Nati Tal and Oleg Zaytsev  said . "This campaign is up and harder than ever to detect and take down." It's no surprise that threat act

Ransomware has emerged as the only cryptocurrency-based crime to grow in 2023, with cybercriminals extorting nearly $175.8 million more than they did a year ago, according to findings from Chainalysis. "Ransomware attackers are on pace for their second-biggest year ever, having extorted at least $449.1 million through June," the blockchain analytics firm  said  in a midyear crypto crime report shared with The Hacker News. "If this pace continues, ransomware attackers will extort $898.6 million from victims in 2023, trailing only 2021's $939.9 million." In contrast, crypto scams have pulled in 77% less revenue than they did through June of 2022, largely driven by the abrupt exit of  VidiLook , which paid users VDL tokens in return for watching digital ads that could then be exchanged for large rewards. So have the inflows to illicit addresses associated with malware, darknet markets, child abuse material, and fraud shops. The development, following a  declin

A coalition of law enforcement agencies across Europe and the U.S.  announced  the takedown of ChipMixer, an unlicensed cryptocurrency mixer that began its operations in August 2017. "The ChipMixer software blocked the blockchain trail of the funds, making it attractive for cybercriminals looking to launder illegal proceeds from criminal activities such as drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, ransomware attacks, and payment card fraud," Europol  said  in a statement. The coordinated exercise, besides dismantling the clearnet and dark web websites associated with ChipMixer, also resulted in the seizure of $47.5 million in Bitcoin and 7 TB of data. Mixers, also called tumblers,  offer full anonymity  for a fee by commingling cryptocurrency from different users – both legitimate and criminally-derived funds – in a manner that makes it hard to trace the origins. This is achieved by funneling different payments into a single pool before splitting up each amount and transmit

Decentralized multi-chain crypto wallet BitKeep on Wednesday confirmed a cyber attack that allowed threat actors to distribute fraudulent versions of its Android app with the goal of stealing users' digital currencies. "With maliciously implanted code, the altered APK led to the leak of user's private keys and enabled the hacker to move funds," BitKeep CEO Kevin Como  said , describing it as a "large-scale hacking incident." According to blockchain security company  PeckShield  and multi-chain blockchain explorer  OKLink , an estimated  $9.9 million  worth of assets have been plundered so far. "Funds stolen are on BNB Chain, Ethereum, TRON and Polygon," BitKeep further  noted  in a series of tweets. "More than 200 addresses on the other three chains were used in the heist, and all funds were transferred to two main addresses in the end." The incident is said to have taken place on December 26, 2022, with the threat actor exploiting

Researchers have disclosed details about a now-patched critical flaw in the Move virtual machine that powers the Aptos blockchain network. The vulnerability "can cause Aptos nodes to crash and cause denial of service," Singapore-based Numen Cyber Labs  said  in a technical write-up published earlier this month. Aptos is a  new entrant  to the blockchain space, which  launched  its  mainnet  on October 17, 2022. It has its roots in the Diem stablecoin payment system proposed by Meta (née Facebook), which also introduced a short-lived digital wallet called  Novi . The network is built using a platform-agnostic programming language known as  Move , a Rust-based system that's  designed  to implement and execute  smart contracts  in a secure  runtime environment , also known as the Move Virtual Machine (aka  MoveVM ). The  vulnerability  identified by Numen Cyber Labs is rooted in the Move language's verification module (" stack_usage_verifier.rs "), a com

The $540 million hack of Axie Infinity's  Ronin Bridge  in late March 2022 was the consequence of one of its former employees getting tricked by a fraudulent job offer on LinkedIn, it has emerged.  According to a report from  The Block  published last week citing two people familiar with the matter, a senior engineer at the company was duped into applying for a job at a non-existent company, causing the individual to download a fake offer document disguised as a PDF. "After what one source described as multiple rounds of interviews, a Sky Mavis engineer was offered a job with an extremely generous compensation package," the Block reported. The offer document subsequently acted as a conduit to deploy malware designed to breach Ronin's network, ultimately facilitating one of the crypto sector's biggest hacks to date. "Sky Mavis employees are under constant advanced spear-phishing attacks on various social channels and one employee was compromised," t

The notorious North Korea-backed hacking collective Lazarus Group is suspected to be behind the recent $100 million altcoin theft from Harmony Horizon Bridge, citing similarities to the  Ronin bridge attack  in March 2022. The finding comes as Harmony  confirmed  that its Horizon Bridge, a  platform  that allows users to move cryptocurrency across different blockchains, had been breached last week. The incident involved the exploiter carrying out multiple transactions on June 23 that extracted tokens stored in the bridge and subsequently making away with about $100 million in cryptocurrency. "The stolen crypto assets included Ether (ETH), Tether (USDT), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) and BNB," blockchain analytics company Elliptic  said  in a new report. "The thief immediately used Uniswap – a decentralized exchange (DEX) – to convert much of these assets into a total of 85,837 ETH." Days later, on June 27, the culprit is said to have begun moving funds amounting to $

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Treasury Department, warned of a new set of ongoing cyber attacks carried out by the Lazarus Group targeting blockchain companies. Calling the activity cluster  TraderTraitor , the infiltrations involve the North Korean state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) actor striking entities operating in the Web3.0 industry since at least 2020. Targeted organizations include cryptocurrency exchanges, decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, play-to-earn cryptocurrency video games, cryptocurrency trading companies, venture capital funds investing in cryptocurrency, and individual holders of large amounts of cryptocurrency or valuable non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The attack chains commence with the threat actor reaching out to victims via different communication platforms to lure them into downloading weaponized cryptocurrency apps for Windows and macOS, subse

The North Korean state-backed hacking crew, otherwise known as the  Lazarus Group , has been attributed to yet another financially motivated campaign that leverages a trojanized decentralized finance (DeFi) wallet app to distribute a fully-featured backdoor onto compromised Windows systems. The app, which is equipped with functionalities to save and manage a cryptocurrency wallet, is also designed to trigger the launch of the implant that can take control of the infected host. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky  said  it first encountered the rogue application in mid-December 2021. The infection scheme initiated by the app also results in the deployment of the installer for a legitimate application, which gets overwritten with a trojanized version in an effort to cover its tracks. That said, the initial access avenue is unclear, although it's suspected to be a case of social engineering. The spawned malware, which masquerades as Google's Chrome web browser, subsequently

Microsoft has warned of emerging threats in the  Web3  landscape, including "ice phishing" campaigns, as a surge in adoption of blockchain and DeFi technologies emphasizes the need to build security into the decentralized web while it's still in its early stages. The company's Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team called out various new avenues through which malicious actors may attempt to trick cryptocurrency users into giving up their private cryptographic keys and carry out unauthorized fund transfers. "One aspect that the immutable and public blockchain enables is complete transparency, so an attack can be observed and studied after it occurred," Christian Seifert, principal research manager at Microsoft's Security and Compliance group,  said . "It also allows assessment of the financial impact of attacks, which is challenging in traditional Web2 phishing attacks." The theft of the keys could be carried out in several ways, including im

A group of academics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, has demonstrated what it calls a "scalable technique" to vet smart contracts and mitigate state-inconsistency bugs, discovering 47 zero-day vulnerabilities on the Ethereum blockchain in the process. Smart contracts are  programs  stored on the blockchain that are automatically executed when predetermined conditions are met based on the encoded terms of the agreement. They allow trusted transactions and agreements to be carried out between anonymous parties without the need for a central authority. In other words, the code itself is meant to be the final arbiter of "the deal" it represents, with the program controlling all aspects of the execution, and providing an immutable evidentiary audit trail of transactions that are both trackable and irreversible. This also means that vulnerabilities in the code could result in hefty losses, as evidenced by hacks aimed at  the DAO  and more recently, 

Google on Tuesday said it took steps to disrupt the operations of a sophisticated "multi-component" botnet called Glupteba that approximately infected more than one million Windows computers across the globe and stored its command-and-control server addresses on Bitcoin's blockchain as a resilience mechanism. As part of the efforts, Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said it partnered with the CyberCrime Investigation Group over the past year to terminate around 63 million Google Docs that were observed to have distributed the malware, alongside 1,183 Google Accounts, 908 Cloud Projects, and 870 Google Ads accounts that were associated with its distribution. Google TAG further said it worked with internet infrastructure providers and hosting providers, such as Cloudflare, to dismantle the malware by taking down servers and placing interstitial warning pages in front of the malicious domains. In tandem, the internet giant also announced a lawsuit against two Russ

The Russian-led REvil ransomware gang was felled by an active multi-country law enforcement operation that resulted in its infrastructure being hacked and  taken offline  for a second time earlier this week, in what's the  latest action  taken by governments to disrupt the lucrative ecosystem. The takedown was first reported by  Reuters , quoting multiple private-sector cyber experts working with the U.S. government, noting that the  May cyber attack  on Colonial Pipeline relied on encryption software developed by REvil associates, officially corroborating DarkSide's  connections  to the prolific criminal outfit. Coinciding with the development, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic  disclosed  that $7 million in bitcoin held by the DarkSide ransomware group were moved through a series of new wallets, with a small fraction of the amount being transferred with each transfer to make the laundered money more difficult to track and  convert   the funds  into fiat currency through

Among the problems stemming from our systemic failure with cybersecurity, which ranges from decades-old software-development practices to Chinese and Russian cyber-attacks, one problem gets far less attention than it should—the insider threat. But the reality is that most organizations should be at least as worried about user management as they are about Bond villain-type hackers launching compromises from abroad. Most organizations have deployed single sign-on and modern identity-management solutions. These generally allow easy on-boarding, user management, and off-boarding. However, on mobile devices, these solutions have been less effective. Examples include mobile applications such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, or even SMS-which are common in the workforce. All of these tools allow for low-friction, agile communication in an increasingly mobile business environment. Today, many of these tools offer end-to-end encryption (e2ee), which is a boon when viewed through the lens of

Popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has suspended all transactions of Ethereum Classic (ETC)—the original unforked version of the Ethereum network—on their trading platforms, other products and services after detecting a potential attack on the cryptocurrency network that let someone spend the same digital coins twice. Why is this attack concerning? The heist resulted in the loss of $1.1 million worth of the Ethereum Classic digital currency. The digital currency immediately fell in price after the news came out. Coinbase revealed Monday that it identified "a deep chain reorganization" of the Ethereum Classic blockchain (or 51 percent attack of the network), which means that someone controlling the majority of miners on the network (over 50%) had modified the transaction history. After reorganizing the Ethereum blockchain, the attackers were able to what's called "double spend" about 219,500 ETC by recovering previously spent coins from the rightfu

Again some bad news for cryptocurrency users. KICKICO, a blockchain-based initial coin offering (ICO) support platform, has fallen victim to a suspected cyber attack and lost more than 70 million KICK tokens (or KickCoins) worth an estimated $7.7 million. In a statement released on its Medium post on July 26, the company acknowledged the security breach, informing its customers that an unknown attacker managed to gain access to the account of the KICK smart contracts and the tokens of the KICKICO platform on last Thursday at around 9:04 (UTC). KICKICO admitted that the company had no clue about the security breach until and unless several of its customers fell victim and complained about losing KickCoin tokens worth $800,000 from their wallets overnight. However, after investigating, the company found that the total amount of stolen funds was 70,000,000 KickCoin, which, at the current exchange rate, is equivalent to $ 7.7 million. KICKICO reported that suspected attackers

Security researchers have discovered a series of new vulnerabilities in EOS blockchain platform, one of which could allow remote hackers to take complete control over the node servers running the critical blockchain-based applications. EOS is an open source smart contract platform, known as 'Blockchain 3.0,' that allows developers to build decentralized applications over blockchain infrastructure, just like Ethereum. Discovered by Chinese security researchers at Qihoo 360 —Yuki Chen of Vulcan team and Zhiniang Peng of Core security team—the vulnerability is a buffer out-of-bounds write issue which resides in the function used by nodes server to parse contracts. To achieve remote code execution on a targeted node, all an attacker needs to do is upload a maliciously crafted WASM file (a smart contract) written in WebAssembly to the server. As soon as the vulnerable process parser reads the WASM file, the malicious payload gets executed on the node, which could then al

Image Credit: Pixelbay Blockchain startups are cropping up left and right aiming to disrupt existing services and business models. These range from the trivial to potentially game-changing solutions that can revolutionize the internet as we know it. Among those that promise to change the world, most are attempting to reconstruct the entire internet infrastructure into something that is decentralized, secure, scalable, and tokenized. There are also those that aim to solve the most significant problems plaguing the digital world, particularly potentially costly and tedious security issues. We do not lack for dangers, ranging from data breaches to denial-of-service attacks, and other hacks. For the most part, there are capable SaaS and software-defined services that are capable enough in addressing the threats that involve malware and DDoS. However, blockchains offer much much more. The plague of DDoS Distributed denial-of-service or DDoS attacks involve a malicious hacke