Germany & Austria's Project BITCRIME

A joint study between Austria and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research will look at the use of virtual currencies and how supposed illicit transactions and alleged criminals can be prevented, detected, tracked and prosecuted. The program, which has funding totalling €1.5m and will run through to the end of 2016, will also look at the need for supervision and regulation in the cryptocurrency space. Continue reading

Phishing With Coinbase

Coinbase has announced their intention to reimburse a small number of users who were the victim of a phishing attack. The attacker, who emailed users a purported new service agreement from Coinbase, used the Coinbase API to fool users into approving full permissions for his 3rd party app so as to withdraw bitcoins from the Coinbase wallet. As a result of the successful attack, Coinbase now claim they will review the approval process for applications using their API. Continue reading