Uber used Bitcoin to pay hackers who held sensitive data for ransom , court documents have confirmed.
As a result , two men pleaded guilty to charges of computer hacking and extortion, bringing a lengthy legal saga that embroiled Uber and LinkedIn -owned training site Lyndaom in costly data breaches to a close.
To access the companies ‘ servers , the hackers gained access to customer information by using Amazon Web Services logins belonging to Uber and Lyndaom employees.
They then contacted both companies to extort them for hundreds of dollars ‘ worth of Bitcoin .
At the time, Uber agreed to pay $100,000 in the cryptocurrency . The payment was processed via the tech giant’s HackerOne bug bounty program , and Uber required the hackers to sign a confidentiality agreement preventing them from using the data and publicly disclosing the security breach.
Vasile Mereacre, from Canada , and Brandon Glover, from Florida , were indicted last year after stealing information of 55,000 accounts from Lyndaom, which unlike Uber , refused to pay.
It was then revealed that both men were also the perpetrators of a 2016 Uber breach that compromised the data of 57 millions users .
Uber kept the security breach private for over a year, until November 2017, when its new leadership became aware of the cover-up and decided to go public.
As a result , the company received a hefty $148 million fine and had to agree to 20 years of privacy audits.
Uber also fired its chief security officer Joe Sullivan, who orchestrated the payments and failed to alert company users about the security breach.
Bancor loses $12.5M worth of Ethereum to cyber baddies in overnight raid
Israeli digital asset exchange Bancor has suffered a major hack – a sizely $23.5 million – in yet another stark reminder that big industry players simply are not paying attention to their security.
Initially described as a “security breach,” Bancor eventually revealed the hackers exploited a compromised wallet, inserting malicious code in certain smart contracts which “allowed the withdrawal of almost 25,000 Ethereum tokens,” worth approximately $12.5 million.
Funnily enough, $10 million in native Bancor coin BNT was able to be immediately frozen and recovered – Bancor ironicially lauding their ability to freeze tokens in situations like these. Lately, such moves have been heavily criticized .
Bancor claims that no user wallets have been compromised, but have been consistently offline since retreating into maintenance mode this morning. No word as to whether an official wallet played a role in the hack, as Bancor are yet to provide updates of their investigation.
A great feature of blockchains like Ethereum is its ultimate transparency; it especially allows for fascinated crypto-geeks to peek vicariously into the world high-tech thievery. Some plucky investigators have tracked down the exact wallet used to siphon the digital booty, made viewable through wallet directory Etherscan .
The Tel-Aviv based start-up broke records when it raised over $150 million during its ICO , attracting the attention of investment billionaire Tim Draper, who later joined the firm as an advisor.
Bancor has been going through a rough patch recently. The company actually developed the algorithm responsible for the wildly erratic free-market for memory featured by EOS. Keep in mind, it only took a few weeks for Blockne lead developer Dan Larimer to express the need to overhaul ‘the Bancor Relay’ in a lengthy Medium post .
Bancor, not surprisingly, are a top 21 block producer – not just a partner. The EOS/Bancor ecosystem, at this point, is perhaps just as critical to the overall liquidity of Bancor as it is to the usability of the EOS token.
The two are so intertwined that when the EOS mainnet launched, an official Bancor post declared: “EOS Is LIVE: Now the Real Work Begins.”
The fallout from today’s hack may be felt directly in future EOS elections – especially since investors have already taken to Reddit to scorch Bancor as unfit for candidacy .
German Bitcoin exchange buys investment bank
We often hear about how Bitcoin is trying to disrupt the financial industry. Well, it turns out one German cryptocurrency startup has cut out the middleman and just bought a bank.
Earlier this week, German cryptocurrency exchange Bitcoin Group SE announced it has successfully bought a 100-percent stake in an investment bank, Tremmel Wertpapierhandelsbank GmbH.
With this purchase, the group will absorb Tremmel’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) license, opening additional doors for product development.
The BaFin license will allow Bitcoin Group SE to develop and sell cryptocurrency-based investment contracts (like futures contracts or ETFs) and also to deploy Bitcoin ATMs.
The announcement has not detailed how much the investment bank has been bought for, however, it is stated to be in the “lower seven-digit range.” Presumably, this means somewhere between one and five million euros.
The deal will be officially closed in the first half of 2019 after obtaining approval from relevant regulatory authorities.
Even though blockchain and cryptocurrency promises to disrupt the financial industry, it hasn’t stopped banks from getting in on a piece of the action too.
Earlier this year an Australian bank used blockchain to track a 17,000 kg shipment of almonds all the way to Germany. In October NatWest announced it would be using blockchain to manage its syndicated loan portfolio .
