There are report that Kasa de la Muntanya has been raided by Spanish police for its connections to Anarchist activity in an operation that has been described as being "Counter-Terrorism" in nature. At least 11 people have been arrested. Kasa de la Muntanya had in the past been profiled by the BBC as being a 'Cyber Squat' and has been described by Julia Tourianski on Twitter as a place that housed several families. An online profile describes Kasa de la Muntanya as a social center which has been occupied since 1989. Continue reading
Category Archives: Security
The Antidote to Ransomware: Prevention
The threat of ransomware as the dominant means by much malware peddlers can extract a quick profit has slowly been growing ever since Bitcoin surpassed the per ounce price of silver in early 2013. Seeing as ransomware has become such a main stream phenomenon that it has reached a New York Post advice column it's high time Qntra has offered some advice on avoiding the pains that ransomware can inflict. Here's a few measures you can take: Continue reading
Blockchain.info Discloses Vulnerability Window
On their blog, Blockchain.info has disclosed that a routine update left them serving insecure code to customers using their wallet between 12:00 AM and 2:30 AM GMT today. All customers who used the Blockchain.info web wallet to interface to create wallets, generate addresses, or send transactions are reported to be affected. The problem given the scope appears to be that Blockchain.info was serving weak pseudo-random number generating software.
First Difficulty Drop of the ASIC Age
Today's difficulty change marks the first time since the introduction of Bitcoin mining ASICs that the network difficulty has dropped. Network difficulty went from 40,300,030,328 to 40,007,470,271 which is a loss of 0.73 percent. The first difficulty decrease happened in 2011 when pool operators discovered the existence of botnet miners for the first time and banned several. Other difficulty decreases happened during the GPU mining era when price dips made the energy cost of mining unprofitable in the near term. Since January 2013, the month before the introduction of the first commercial ASIC miners by Avalon mining difficulty has increased by more than 1,300,000 percent.
Sony Pictures Suffers Targeted Cyber Attack
The Los Angeles Times reports that a group calling itself #GOP or "Guardians of Peace" has compromised the ability of movie studio Sony Pictures to derive any utility from their information technology infrastructure. Allegedly the group behind the event has not made any concrete demands, but is threatening to leak internal information from the studio to the web if certain demands are not met. This event deviates from typical, far less selective, ransomware attacks which happen to affect single computers opportunistically and then demand a set monetary ransom to facilitate the recovery of files. Self Proclaimed "hack victim" Mark Karpeles have offered that the Sony hackers might be Chinese or Korean based on a text encoding error.
Bank Hacker Who Blackmailed For Bitcoin to be Sentenced
Lewys Martin who plead guilty to hacking Halifax Bank and demanding a ransom of 2800 BTC in exchange for not releasing the details of 28,000 account holders will likely have his sentence announced according to City AM. A detail of particular note is that the police:
managed to trace Martin despite him using specialised software to shield his IP address.
Rick Snyder Announces Michigan Cyber Civilian Corps
Following in the wake of the Detroit Mayor's announcement that they were too poor to pay a ransom, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has announced that the state plans to deploy "volunteer information security experts" in order to combat attacks on Michigan's information technology infrastructure. This announcement came at the same North American International Cyber Summit. Continue reading
This Onion, It Smells: Inherent Hazards of the Tor Network
This week Pando Daily's Yasha Levine wrote a follow up to a post from this summer where Yasha documented many of the numerous and transparent connections between the Tor developers and the United States Government. Nothing Yasha wrote in the original piece is particularly controversial, nearly all of it comes from public records, but still Yasha was able to write a follow up on all of the venom Yasha received from fans of Tor without any actual refutations of her points. The simple fact of the matter is that Tor was born of the needs of the United States Government's intelligence community, and continued funding to keep the main Tor developers fed, clothed, and sheltered largely comes from the coffers of those interests. Continue reading
Internet Service Providers Stripping STARTTLS Flag
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation a number of Internet Service Providers are stripping the STARTTLS flag from their customer's email sessions. STARTTLS is a protocol that encrypts emails between origin and destination servers, but leaves the plaintext contents of email completely accessible on the servers. The property of STARTTLS which allows ISPs to deny their customers to use it is explicitly baked into the protocol. Continue reading
Silk Road 2.0 Seized, Blake Benthall Arrested
Today the FBI announced the closure of the Silk Road 2.0 and the arrest yesterday of Blake Benthall the alleged operator of Silk Road 2.0 who operated under the moniker "Defcon." The charges leveled at Benthall include: Continue reading