BlockThreat - Week 48, 2019
Upbit | Vertcoin | FSB | North Korea
Hacks
- South Korean crypto exchange Upbit has lost cryptocurrency worth $49 million - in a confirmed announcement 342,000 ETH has been stolen on November 27th and sent to an unknown wallet 0xa09871AEadF4994Ca12f5c0b6056BBd1d343c029.
- Vertcoin (VTC) was 51% attacked - five outputs were double spent on the Vertcoin network as a result of the 51% attack netting an attacker just 125 VTC ($29). The attacker most likely obtained the hash power by renting it on Nicehash.
- A hacking group is hijacking Docker systems with exposed API endpoints - reports of a mass internet scanning for open Docker endpoints to install an image with Monero miner.
Crime
- The Secret Life and Strange Death of Quadriga Founder Gerald Cotten - a Vanity Fair article into the life of Gerald Cotten, scams he ran before Quadriga, theft of funds, and finally his odd death.
- CipherTrace Q3 2019 Cryptocurrency Anti-Money Laundering Report - a quarterly report into the cryptocurrency related thefts, scams and other criminal activity.
- Little-Known Crypto Exchange With Ties to a Shanghai Firm Halts Services, Says CEO ‘Missing’ - a likely exit scam involving a missing CEO and frozen cold storage funds.
- Russia’s FSB Linked to $450M Bitcoin Disappearance - an article based on the BBC Russia report into the link between BTC-e exchange and Russia’s FSB services.
- U.S. authorities arrest Ethereum research scientist Virgil Griffith for allegedly assisting North Korea in evading sanctions - reports of an arrest of an Ethereum developer who traveled to North Korea to present at a cryptocurrency conference.
Malware
- Insights from one year of tracking a polymorphic threat - analysis of a complex malware family Dexphot utilizing several stealth and polymorphic techniques.
- Stantinko botnet adds cryptomining to its pool of criminal activities - an interesting sample which obfuscates miner traffic through the use of proxies. Configuration data for the proxies is stored on YouTube.
Research
- Clustering transactions in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies - findings from the network-level privacy attacks on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency networks.
- Debunking the Binance police raids with OSINT - analysis of Shanghai government visits to cryptocurrency companies and how it may have involved Binance.
- Inside Kraken Security Labs: Crypto Domain Hijacking - a domain takeover attack targeting a directory service for PGP keys and bitcoin receiving addresses.
- NSA Backdoors and Bitcoin - a curious case of selecting ECC curves for Bitcoin and dodging an NSA backdoor built into an alternative version used by most of the industry.
Tools
- A beginner’s guide to MythX - introduction to smart contract security assessments using MythX.
- ContractGuard: Defend Ethereum Smart Contracts with Embedded Intrusion Detection - a novel solution to build-in defenses into the smart contract itself.