The funds from Harmony’s Horizon Bridge have begun to move into the Tornado Cash Ethererum mixer, signaling that the attacker has no intention of accepting the $1 million bounty offered. The decision to obfuscate the ill-gotten gains answers questions about whether the Harmony team’s offer of just 1% of the $100 million in crypto funds stolen on Friday would be enough to convince the exploiter to return them. #PeckShieldAlert ~6k $ETH (~$7.1m) into @TornadoCash from @harmonyprotocol exploiters Intermediary address: 0x432...47ae pic.twitter.com/AR9dmJRQet — PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) June 27, 2022 A total of 18,036.3 Ether (ETH), worth about $21 million, was moved out …

Lonely hearts in Silicon Valley are reportedly falling prey to a wave of “pig slaughtering” crypto scams via dating applications. An investigator for cybersecurity company Sift found that one in 20 people who approached her on dating apps in San Francisco was working the scam. Pig slaughtering, or butchering, is a type of scam in which an individual/group puts in weeks or months of work to build a fake relationship with the victim, metaphorically fattening them up. The end goal is to get the victim to invest in crypto via either a duplicated version of a legitimate website or by …

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have issued an alert on North Korean state-sponsored cyber threats that target blockchain companies in response to the Ronin Bridge hack last month. The alert was issued on Monday in conjunction with the FBI and the Treasury Department, which had warnings and mitigation suggestions for blockchain and crypto firms to ensure their own operations remain safe from hackers. With the @FBI, and @USTreasury, we released a new cybersecurity advisory on North Korean state-sponsored activity targeting blockchain technology and the cryptocurrency industry. Read the technical guidance and mitigation …

Virgil Griffith, a former Ethereum (ETH) developer has been sentenced to 63 months in prison and will pay a fine of $100,000 for attending a conference and assisting North Korea use blockchain technology in contravention of economic sanctions imposed by the United States. On Tuesday, April 12, U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York handed down the decision. Judge Castel stated that “what you see here is intentionality, a deliberate, willful intent to violate the sanctions' regime,” adding that the crime was made worse because Griffith had a “desire to educate people on how to …

Christopher Wray, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said that fiat was a more likely avenue for Russia to explore in circumventing sanctions given the United States’ ability to block efforts using crypto. In a Thursday hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich asked the FBI director if Russia might respond to the economic impact of the United States banning imports of the country’s oil and gas by using reserves of gold, China’s currency, or cryptocurrency. Director Wray said the FBI and its partners had "built up significant expertise" on digital assets, …

On Feb. 17, United States Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced at the Munich Cyber Security Conference the formation of the new task force “dedicated to cryptocurrency” within the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Coming four months after the launch of the Justice Department’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET), this marks another major step in the U.S. government’s crusade against criminal abuse of cryptocurrencies. What the task force will look like The name of the new task force that Monaco revealed is the Virtual Asset Exploitation Unit (VAXU). It will bring together the personnel from the various units of the …

U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco has announced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation will be increasing efforts to address enforcement in the digital asset space with the formation of a new team. Speaking at the Munich Cyber Security Conference on Thursday, Monaco said the FBI was creating a “specialized team dedicated to cryptocurrency” called the Virtual Asset Exploitation Unit. The unit will include crypto experts and as well have the means for blockchain analysis that may eventually be used to track and seize illicit funds. The formation of the FBI team comes more than four months after Monaco announced …

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued a warning against the rise in romance scams in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the latest trend involving cryptocurrencies. Just a few days ahead of Valentine’s day, the FBI San Francisco field office alerted the public about the rise in romance scams based on the complaints filed with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). A romance scam involves creating fake accounts and convincing unwary investors — both men and women — to transfer funds under the pretext of getting romantic. According to the information shared by the FBI: …

A new report shared by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) highlights an ongoing phishing campaign against YouTube creators, typically resulting in the compromise and sale of channels for broadcasting cryptocurrency scams. The TAG attributes the attacks to a group of hackers recruited in a Russian-speaking forum that hacks the creator’s channel by offering fake collaboration opportunities. Once hijacked, the YouTube channels are either sold to the highest bidder or used to broadcast cryptocurrency scams: “A large number of hijacked channels were rebranded for cryptocurrency scam live-streaming. On account-trading markets, hijacked channels ranged from $3 USD to $4,000 USD depending on …

Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska has once again called on the Russian government to stop ignoring Bitcoin (BTC) after the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation raided his homes in Washington and New York. In a Telegram post on Thursday, Deripaska argued that the Bank of Russia has been “infantile in ignoring the growing cryptocurrency market,” while the U.S. Department of the Treasury has been “investing particularly in this direction.” The billionaire emphasized that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have massive potential to not only help Russia avoid U.S. sanctions but also weaken the U.S. dollar, stating: “The U.S. had realized long ago …

Investigations into the South African company Mirror Trading International (MTI) — widely seen as last year’s most ruinous Bitcoin (BTC) Ponzi scheme — are now engaging the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. MTI, which went into provisional liquidation in December 2020, claimed to have over 260,000 members across 170 countries at its height. It had first caught regulators’ attention in Texas back in July of last year, where its operations were quickly shut down. South Africa’s Financial Services Conduct Authority (FSCA) issued its own statement in August 2020, warning that the company lacked a mandatory license and was offering …

About 2,000 years ago during its Han dynasty, China made peace with some of the nomadic people of Central Asia who continuously ransacked Silk Road traders for an easy payday. It did so in order to fully establish the Silk Road trade route, which stretched from China to Europe, and to secure a great source of wealth from trading in luxury goods. Now, as trade increasingly has shifted to the digital realm during the global COVID-19 pandemic, cyberattackers are taking advantage of organizations’ lax cybersecurity measures. They are using ransomware to lock these organizations’ data with encryption until a ransom …