The software available for download on Monero’s (XMR) official website was compromised to steal cryptocurrency, according to a Nov. 19 Reddit post published by the coin’s core development team. The command-line interface (CLI) tools available at getmonero.org may have been compromised over the last 24 hours. In the announcement, the team notes that the hash of the binaries available for download did not match the expected hashes. The software was malicious On GitHub, a professional investigator going by the name of Serhack said that the software distributed after the server was compromised is indeed malicious, stating: “I can confirm that …

Australian law enforcement arrested an unnamed 38-year-old Australian man for performing unregistered cryptocurrency transactions. The police department of Victoria announced on Nov. 12 that the man has been arrested at his address in the town of Cairnlea. The joint report from the Victoria Police and Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) reads: “Detectives from the E-Crime Squad have arrested a man today as part of an investigation into unregistered cryptocurrency transactions.” Money laundering accusations The Cairnlea resident is accused of violation of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act of 2006 for providing an unregistered crypto exchange service and …

Gregg Bennett, a SIM-swap hack victim and angel investor, sued cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex over allegedly allowing the theft of nearly $1 million in Bitcoin (BTC). According to a press release published on Oct. 30, Bennett believes the exchange violated its own security standards and allowed hackers to steal his cryptocurrency in April. The lawsuit, filed in King County Superior Court, suggests that the exchange committed “unfair and deceptive acts that misrepresented its level of security." A SIM-swapping attack The hackers reportedly took control of Bennett’s mobile number and then used it to access his online accounts, including Bittrex, on April …

California resident Seth Shapiro has filed a lawsuit against wireless service giant AT&T alleging that its employees helped to perpetrate a SIM-swap which resulted in the theft of over $1.8 million in total, including cryptocurrencies. The complaint filed on Oct. 17 claims that Shapiro is “a two-time Emmy Award-winning media and technology expert, author, and adjunct professor at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.” The lawsuit alleges that between May 16 and May 18 AT&T employees transferred access to Shapiro’s mobile phone to outside hackers: “AT&T employees obtained unauthorized access to Mr. Shapiro’s AT&T wireless account, viewed …

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) name auctions were halted because of a bug that resulted in names being awarded to wrong users and for lower bids. Faulty documentation ENS’s editor Brantly Millegan announced the halt of the name auctioning service in a Medium article published on Sept. 30. He noted that most of the first auctions concluded successfully and only a few were affected by the bug. The anomalous result of some auctions had two distinct causes, one of which lies in documentation, not the software, according to Millegan. Per the announcement, “some bidders were given incorrect information on how to …

Fusion Network’s token swap wallet was compromised. Roughly a third of FSN tokens was stolen as a result. Fusion Foundation announced in a Medium post published on Sept. 29 that its swap wallet was compromised, which resulted in the theft of 10 million native FSN and 3.5 million Ethereum (ETH)-based ERC-20 FSN tokens. The total worth of stolen FSN tokens was estimated at around $6.4 million at that time. The Foundation’s investigation has not revealed any other affected wallets so far. The alleged cybercriminal reportedly started to launder the coins already: “After the currency was stolen, abnormal wash-trading behaviour occurred, …

Binance claims to have assisted British prosecutors in an investigation of an online fraud that resulted in over $51 million losses by victims. Criminal is now jailed On Sept. 26, Binance’s chief compliance officer Samuel Lim published a blog post saying that the exchange was working with the Cyber Crime Unit of the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service to investigate into Bulgarian phishing expert Svetoslav Donchev. As officially reported by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), Donchev, 37, was extradited to the U.K. from Bulgaria to face the online scamming fraud charges and pleaded guilty to five offences to receive a …

Four out of the first five results presented when querying Google for a “bitcoin qr generator” lead to scam websites. The findings Cryptocurrency wallet ZenGo wrote the findings in a blog post published on Aug. 29. Reportedly, when researching prior to implementing QR Code support in their wallet, ZenGo learned of the prevalence of scam QR Code generators. The company explains how the alleged scam works: “These sites generate a QR code that encodes an address controlled by the scammers, instead of the one requested by the user, thus directing all payments for this QR code to the scammers.” QR …

Chinese authorities arrested fifteen men suspected of corrupting an internet café administrator to mine cryptocurrency. Local crypto industry news outlet 8BTC reported on Sept. 3 that police in Henyang, a city in south central China’s Hunan province, arrested the man for cryptojacking. Over 9,000 computer administrators were reportedly involved in helping the unauthorized mining operation. A profitable endeavor The cryptocurrency mined by the suspects in the four months ending in July has been sold for over a hundred million yuan (about $14 million). Local police received a report suggesting that many local Internet cafes were running cryptojacking malware. The findings …

Neil Wals, chief of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Global Cybercrime Program, warned that cryptocurrencies have made combating money laundering significantly harder. Australian news outlet ABC reported on Aug. 29 that Wals said cryptocurrencies make fighting cybercrime, money laundering and financing of terrorism harder. Wals expressed the idea that criminals using crypto assets include global child sexual exploitation networks, which he says are more widespread than much of the public understands. Crypto adds a layer of secrecy He believes that cryptocurrencies add a layer of secrecy, which can facilitate crime. The news comes after Treasury Secretary Steven …

A cryptojacking code was found in 11 open-source code libraries written in Ruby, which have been downloaded thousands of times. Hackers downloaded the software, infected it with malware, and subsequently reposted it on the RubyGems platform, industry news outlet Decrypt reported on Aug. 21. The malicious code was first noticed by a GitHub user, who posted about the issue on Aug. 19. He said that, when executed, the library downloaded additional code from text hosting service Pastebin, which then triggered the malicious mining. The malware also sent the address of the infected host to the attacker, alongside environment variables which …

The federal judge overseeing Terpin Vs. AT&T has dismissed the motion. This news is the latest in a legal battle pertaining to crypto stolen via SIM-swapping that has been going on for almost a year industry news outlet, The Block, reports on July 26. As Cointelegraph previously reported, in August last year Terpin filed a lawsuit against AT&T, since he believes that the telecoms giant had provided hackers with access to his phone number, which led to a major crypto heist. Earlier this month the federal judge overseeing the case has also denied the telecom giant’s motion for dismissal. Per …