X-Industry

A former technical manager employed by the wind farm operator Nordex has been sentenced to 120 hours of community service by a Dutch court.  The sentence follows the discovery that the employee had used company infrastructure to power a clandestine cryptocurrency mining operation across two renewable energy sites.   The rogue employee, a man in his forties, exploited his privileged access to the company’s internal systems between August and November 2022.

According to court proceedings in Assen,

China has plans to introduce tighter regulatory controls over Artificial Intelligence (AI) Data Centers, which could have significant effects on the cryptocurrency market, sending ripples through the technology markets.  Such policies could impact the operational freedom of AI-driven companies and data processing hubs within the country.  Chinese regulators informed major tech companies, including Alibaba, Tencent Holdings, ByteDance, and Baidu, that they would tighten control over the construct

On 21 February 2025, hackers stole around $1.4 billion in Ethereum cryptocurrency from crypto exchange Bybit, in what is the largest crypto heist of all time.  After the hack, several blockchain monitoring firms, as well as the well-known crypto investigator ZachXBT, have all pointed to the North Korean government hacking group known as Lazarus Group as the culprit.

ZachXBT was the first to point the finger of blame, just a few hours after he himself noticed the first signs of the hack.  The res

A federal grand jury has indicted a 51-year-old church pastor on 26 counts of fraud, after allegedly using his position to deceive victims into investing in a cryptocurrency investment scam.  That would seem unusual, but what is even more bizarre is that the pastor alleged to be behind the scheme claims that the inspiration for the project came to him in a dream.  Francier Obando Pinillo, of Miami, Florida, is alleged to have exploited his position at a Spanish-language church in Pasco, Washingt

DMM Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency exchange based in Japan, operated by DMM Group, a large Japanese e-commerce and entertainment conglomerate. Launched in 2018, the platform allows users to trade various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple, through spot trading and leverage trading services. In June 2024, the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange announced that cybercriminals stole 4,502.9 Bitcoin (BTC), approximately $304 million (48.2 billion yen), from its wallets.

“At approxima

The operator of the cryptocurrency mixing service Helix was sentenced to three years in prison last week.  Akron, Ohio native Larry Dean Harmon, 41, pleaded guilty in 2021 to conspiracy to commit money laundering.  A US Justice Department spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment about why the sentencing took place three years after the deal was agreed to.  It is unclear whether Harmon will be released this year.  In addition to his term in prison, Harmon was sentenced to three years

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has announced arrests and charges against several individuals and entities for allegedly manipulating digital asset markets as part of a widespread fraud operation. The law enforcement action, codenamed Operation Token Mirrors, is the result of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) taking the "unprecedented step" of creating its own cryptocurrency token and company, NexFundAI.

NexFundAI, as per information on the website, was marketed as redefining the "

Automating the on-demand collection of memory dumps, process information, system files, and event logs for inclusion in threat-hunting activities allows for a more comprehensive and proactive approach to adaptive threat-hunting. In the WatchTower Threat Hunting blog series, Sentinel Labs calls out some adaptive threat-hunting methodologies, including Chained Detections, a Multi-Directional Approach, and AI-powered hunts. This shows the benefits of applying a multi-directional approach to adaptiv

The Marko Polo cybercrime gang represents a growing global financial threat, steering at least 30 ongoing fraud campaigns simultaneously and wielding an arsenal of sophisticated malware that has compromised tens of thousands of devices.  Researchers reported that the group's scams are going after individuals and organizations alike by impersonating popular brands such as Zoom, Discord, and OpenSea, mainly in online gaming, virtual meeting software, and cryptocurrency platform markets.  The effor

The HardBit ransomware first appeared in October 2022, with a 2.0 version coming shortly thereafter in November of 2022.   As one expects of a ransomware attack, HardBit targets organizations and demands cryptocurrency payments in exchange for decrypting data. 

Earlier variants of HardBit aren’t noted as being especially unique, though one standout attribute of HardBit is that the operators have enhanced their extortion tactics by demanding to know about the victim’s potential cyber insurance co

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) on 24 April 2024 announced the arrest of two co-founders of a cryptocurrency mixer called Samourai. It seized the service for allegedly facilitating over $2 billion in illegal transactions and laundering more than $100 million in criminal proceeds.  Keonne Rodriguez, 35, and William Lonergan Hill, 65, have been charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business from 2015 through February 2024.

Eclipse attacks are a special type of cyberattack where an attacker creates an artificial environment around one node, or user, which allows the attacker to manipulate the affected node into wrongful action.  By isolating a target node from its legitimate neighboring nodes, eclipse attacks can produce illegitimate transaction confirmations, among other effects on the network. While these types of attacks isolate individual nodes, the effectiveness of eclipse attacks at disrupting network nodes a

Microsoft representatives have warned that adversaries use OAuth applications as an automation tool to deploy virtual machines (VMs) for cryptocurrency mining and launch phishing attacks.  "Threat actors compromise user accounts to create, modify, and grant high privileges to OAuth applications that they can misuse to hide malicious activity," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in an analysis.  The misuse of OAuth also enables threat actors to maintain access to applications even if the

In the secretive world of venture capital and startups, information means access and it means money.  And so, it is rare that we see closely-guarded information the financials, the emails, the cap table all picked apart and challenged for anyone who chooses to pay attention.  It is rare we hear a startup’s executives give unadulterated answers to questions on the record, under oath laying out how things really went under the hood.  We only get that kind of a look at a private company when things

A highly sophisticated piece of malware posing as a cryptocurrency miner has stayed hidden for five years, infecting more than one million devices, cybersecurity investigators warn.  Named StripedFly, the threat contains code sequences previously observed in the malware used by the threat actor known as the Equation Group, known for APT malware and attacks, which has been linked to the US National Security Agency.

Designed as a modular framework, StripedFly can target both Windows and Linux and

A new malware-as-a-service option for cybercriminals known as BunnyLoader was released on September 4^th, 2023.  It has since seen a variety of updates and has reached version 2.0.  As one might expect from any number of the “as a service” monikers, malware-as-a-service is a business model for cybercriminals.  The business model is such that malware and its associated infrastructure are provided to customers for a fee.  This can also be seen as a variation to the software-as-a-service model.

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"There's a sucker born every minute" is a phrase closely associated with PT Barnum, an American showman of the mid-19th century, although there is no evidence that he said it.  Early examples of its use are among gamblers and confidence tricksters of the era.  A previously undetected cryptocurrency scam has leveraged over 1,000 fraudulent websites to ensnare users into a bogus rewards scheme since at least January 2021.

This massive campaign has likely resulted in thousands of people being scamm

FortiGuard Labs discovered an ongoing threat campaign targeting YouTube viewers searching for pirated software earlier this month.  Videos advertising downloads of “cracked” (aka pirated) software are uploaded by verified YouTube channels with a large number of subscribers.  Victims are led to execute malicious binaries that install multiple malware into their systems focused on harvesting credentials, cryptojacking, and stealing cryptocurrency funds from wallets.

While investigating this campai

Americans do not have a lot of faith in cryptocurrency.  Around 75% of those familiar with crypto say they are not confident that the current ways to invest in, trade or use cryptocurrency are reliable and safe, according to Pew Research Center’s April 2023 survey of 10,071 people ages 18 and older living in the US.  The survey found that about 18% say they are somewhat confident, but just 6% feel extremely or very confident.  Confidence varies by age as well. The survey found that about 66% of

In the cryptocurrency ecosystem, coins have a story, tracked in the unchangeable blockchains underpinning their economy.  The only exception, in some sense, is a cryptocurrency freshly generated by its owner's computational power.  Unsurprisingly, Kim Jong-Un’s North Korean hackers have begun adopting a new trick to launder the coins they steal from victims worldwide and use their dirty, stolen coins in services that allow them to mine innocent new ones.

Recently, cybersecurity investigators pub