The incident reportedly took place in an Austrian restaurant this week with the cyber thieves moving the digital currency to an “unknown, non-traceable account,” police said in a statement.
The 36-year-old victim reportedly logged on to the unsecured network to check the value of his Bitcoin holdings. He later realised that $100,000 euros worth had been stolen.
It remains unclear whether the victim’s account was already hacked before he logged on to the unsecured network, police said.
The incident, while small in nature, highlights the issue of hackers targeting personal Bitcoin accounts as the digital currency has exploded in value in recent years.
While Bitcoin is arguably becoming mainstream, it has had to endure a string of controversies along the way.
In January 2014, a Japanese-based Bitcoin exchange known as Mt Gox was hacked. It was once the largest bitcoin intermediary and the world’s leading bitcoin exchange before thieves made off with 850,000 BTC. At today’s value, that’s worth a staggering $A 9,147,700,000.
In June this year, South Korea’s largest Ethereum (another popular cryptocurrency) and Bitcoin exchange was breached by hackers who stole customers’ data and targeted their accounts in an effort to drain their digital wallets. According to local media reports, one person claimed to have lost 1.2 billion won, or about $A1.4 million.
And this week, a cryptocurrency start-up specialising in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) called Confido raised about $500,000 before the company’s website and founders vanished, along with the cash.
These are just a few examples of the potential dangers posed by operating in the still emerging crypto market. That being said, the threat of hackers certainly isn’t a problem confined to cryptocurrencies as hackers have also targeted central banks, recently fleecing more than $US100 million from the Bangladesh central bank’s account at the US Federal Reserve.
But if you’re going to check how much your Bitcoin wallet is worth, maybe be careful about where you log on.
Source: National Cyber Security – Produced By Gregory Evans Barely a month passes in 2017 without some kind of IT failure hitting the headlines, but the hacks, leaks and breaches that make the news may represent just the tip of the iceberg. An investigation by the i newspaper has revealed that public bodies such as […]
D5 Creation
Posted by: | on February 11, 2018
Stolen #identities and a #lack of #verification render #public comment #procedures #meaningless
Source: National Cyber Security News
Before implementing policy and regulatory changes, federal agencies are legally required to permit the public to comment directly to the agency. At the end of the comment period, it is customary for the agency review the comments received and, occasionally, include comments received concerning the policy change or regulation.
Prior to the Federal Communication Commission’s decision to repeal the 2015 net neutrality rules, the FCC received over 22 million comments. If that sounds like a lot, it is. So many, in fact, that it prompted a closer look by the agency. As a result of its investigation, it determined that millions of these comments were fake. According to multiple researchers, more than one million of the 22 million cumulative comments were bots that used natural language generation to artificially amplify the call to repeal net neutrality protections. On June 19, 2017, nearly 500,000 comments were submitted in a mere second and nearly all of them were identical. In fact, about 7,000 comments were submitted under the name, “The Internet” and over 400,000 of them came from Russian email addresses.
The FCC is not alone, as other agencies have received fake comments from living as well as dead Americans including the SEC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Department of Labor (DOL).
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Posted in HTCS Blogs | Comments Off on Stolen #identities and a #lack of #verification render #public comment #procedures #meaningless
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