Five Major Credit Cards Are Now Blocking Cryptocurrency Purchases

An anonymous reader quotes CNBC: J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup said Friday they are no longer allowing customers to buy cryptocurrencies using credit cards. “At this time, we are not processing cryptocurrency purchases using credit cards, due to the volatility and risk involved, ” a J.P. Morgan Chase spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. “We will review the issue as the market evolves.” A Bank of America spokesperson also said in an email that the bank has decided to decline credit card purchases of cryptocurrencies. Citigroup said in a statement that it has “made the decision to no longer permit credit card purchases of cryptocurrency. We will continue to review our policy as this market evolves.” Earlier in January, Capital One Financial said it has decided to ban cryptocurrency purchases with its cards. Discover Financial Services has effectively prohibited cryptocurrency purchases with its credit cards since 2015. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View original post here:
Five Major Credit Cards Are Now Blocking Cryptocurrency Purchases

Coinbase Is Making $2.7 Million a Day

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bitcoin News: In information released to shareholders this week, Coinbase revealed that it recorded turnover of $1 billion last year, which works out at an astonishing $2.74 million a day or $2, 000 a minute. As America’s largest bitcoin broker, Coinbase claims the lion’s share of the money that’s pouring into the crypto space at a dizzying rate. 2017 was a bumper year for all crypto exchanges, which reported record numbers across the board: new signups, new staff hired, new trading pairs, and new revenue. Those revenue streams have turned into a torrent that has caused Coinbase’ coffers to swell. Recode reports that the company’s revenue exceeded $1 billion last year, most of it derived from the trading fees it levies. These vary from between 0.25% and 1%. and quickly add up: in the past 24 hours, 36, 000 BTC were traded on Coinbase, accounting for more than 15% of the total market. Coinbase isn’t the world’s largest exchange (and is technically a broker rather than a conventional exchange — that duty falls to its GDAX subsidiary) but it’s the best known and carries great weight in the cryptocurrency industry. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More here:
Coinbase Is Making $2.7 Million a Day

Bitcoin Jumps Another 10% in 24 Hours, Sets New Record at $19,000

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: Bitcoin’s price set a new record on Saturday as the virtual currency rose above $19, 000 for the first time on the Bitstamp exchange. The gains came just hours after the currency crossed the $18, 000 mark. Bitcoin’s value has doubled over the last three weeks, and it’s up more than 20-fold over the last year. Bitcoin’s value keeps rising despite a growing chorus of experts who say the currency value is an unsustainable bubble. One CNBC survey this week found that 80 percent of Wall Street economists and market strategists saw bitcoin’s rise as a bubble, compared to just two percent who said the currency’s value was justified. Another survey reported by The Wall Street Journal this week found that 51 out of 53 economists surveyed thought bitcoin’s price was an unsustainable bubble. Less than a month ago, Bitcoin was selling for $8, 000. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
Bitcoin Jumps Another 10% in 24 Hours, Sets New Record at $19,000

MalwareTech’s legal defense fund bombarded with fraudulent donations

Enlarge / Marcus Hutchins. (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images) Marcus Hutchins, the popular British security researcher, has a new legal headache beyond the criminal charges against him. Hutchins, AKA “MalwareTech,” pleaded not guilty two weeks ago to criminal charges in Wisconsin that accuse him of creating and distributing the Kronos malware that steals banking credentials. Now comes word that his legal defense fund was riddled with illicit donations. At least $150,000 in donations originated from stolen credit cards or fake credit card numbers, according to Tor Ekeland, a  criminal defense attorney who is not on Hutchins’ defense team. Ekeland, who became popular in hacking circles for successfully defending Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, had started a legal fund on Hutchins’ behalf. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Visit site:
MalwareTech’s legal defense fund bombarded with fraudulent donations

Hackers Vandalize Vegas Pool Party Club in ‘All Out War’

From a CNET report: Next to DJ Tiesto’s loud image on Wet Republic’s website sits a photo of a bikini model with a beard and an eye patch, with a simple message: “It’s all out war.” Not exactly the type of message you’d expect from a spot that advertises itself as a dance club that doubles as a pool party, but when hackers are in town for Defcon, everything seems to be fair game. The hacker convention, which is in its 25th year in Las Vegas, typically has hotels on alert for its three days of Sin City talk, demos and mischief. Guests are encouraged not to pick up any flash drives lying around, and employees are trained to be wary of social engineering — that is, bad guys pretending to be someone innocent and in need of just a little help. Small acts of vandalism pop up around town. At Caesars Palace, where Defcon is happening, the casino’s UPS store told guests it was not accepting any print requests from USB drives or links, and only printing from email attachments. Hackers who saw this laughed, considering that emails are hardly immune from malware. But the message is clear: During these next few days, hackers are going to have their fun, whether it’s through a compromised Wi-Fi network or an open-to-mischief website. Wet Republic’s site had two images vandalized, both for the “Hot 100” party with DJ Shift. The digital graffiti popped up early Friday morning, less than 24 hours after Defcon kicked off. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View post:
Hackers Vandalize Vegas Pool Party Club in ‘All Out War’

Chipotle finds malware exposed credit card info across the US

Hackers stole credit card information from customers at Chipotle restaurants across the United States between March 24th and April 18th, the company announced today. Chipotle revealed in April that it had been the victim of an attack, and today it shared details about the type of information stolen from customers, which covered “cardholder name in addition to card number, expiration date, and internal verification code.” No other information was compromised, Chipotle said. The attack pulled data off the magnetic strips of credit cards used in physical Chipotle locations around the US. The company has not said how many customers were affected, though it offered a searchable list of locations that were actually hit in the attack, including the dates each restaurant was vulnerable. Some were compromised for about a week, and others for the full four weeks. If you swiped a credit card at a Chipotle in March or April, check out the list of affected restaurants right here . “Because of the nature of the incident and the type of data involved, we do not know how many unique payment cards may have been involved, ” Chipotle spokesperson Chris Arnold told Engadget. As Reuters notes, Chipotle is not offering credit monitoring services to compromised customers. The company said monitoring services don’t alert customers when a fraudulent charge is made in their name. “Chipotle takes this kind of issue very seriously, and we regret any inconvenience or concern it may have caused, ” Arnold told Engadget. “To help prevent a similar incident from recurring, we have resolved the issue and continue to work with cyber security firms to evaluate ways to enhance our security measures.” Source: Chipotle

View original post here:
Chipotle finds malware exposed credit card info across the US

A Database of Thousands of Credit Cards Was Left Exposed on the Open Internet

A US online pet store has exposed the details of more than 110, 400 credit cards used to make purchases through its website, researchers have found. From a report on ZDNet: In a stunning show of poor security, the Austin, TX-based company FuturePets.com exposed its entire customer database, including names, postal and email addresses, phone numbers, credit card information, and plain-text passwords. Several customers that we reached out to confirmed some of their information when it was provided by ZDNet, but did not want to be named. The database was exposed because of the company’s own insecure server and use of “rsync, ” a common protocol used for synchronizing copies of files between two different computers, which wasn’t protected with a username or password. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the original:
A Database of Thousands of Credit Cards Was Left Exposed on the Open Internet

Amazon is buying the ‘Amazon of the Middle East’

Amazon wants to be a one-stop shop for the entire world, but has struggled to get a foothold in the Middle East. After months of deliberations , the company has finally purchased Souq.com, the “Amazon of the Middle East.” Russ Grandinetti, Amazon VP, says that the deal is a no-brainer, since both sites “share the same DNA, ” adding that the pair will now “work hard to provide the best possible service” in the region. The price hasn’t been disclosed, but rumors from the back-end of 2016 claimed that Souq’s founders were looking for a cool $1 billion. TechCrunch believes that the price was haggled down during negotiations, and thinks that the final fee was closer to $650 million. For that chunk of change, Amazon will now have a strong presence in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE with plenty of the knotty issues of doing business in the Middle East already fixed. For example, credit cards aren’t ubiquitous in the area, so Souq developed a prepayment card where users top up in retail stores before ordering goods online. There’s also no unified logistics platform in many locations, or addresses, so Souq had to build a network of local couriers who knows where people live. There’s no word on if Amazon will look to rebrand Souq with its own logo, although it’s not that likely given its normal procedure. After all, Zappos, Twitch, and IMDb aren’t called Amazon Shoes, Amazon Game Videos or Amazon Movie Database for nothing. Then again, the fact that the site is gaining a foothold in a new region, there may be a temptation to bring everything under the classic brand. Source: Amazon (BusinessWire)

Follow this link:
Amazon is buying the ‘Amazon of the Middle East’

This Is Why Your Credit Card Transactions Take So Long to Clear

When you swipe a credit or debit card at the store, your done with the transaction instantly. So why can’t your account statement keep up? If you’ve wondered why it takes so long for purchases to show up on your credit card statement or withdraw from a bank, it’s because of a long, complicated process behind the scenes. Read more…

View original post here:
This Is Why Your Credit Card Transactions Take So Long to Clear

20 hotels suffer hack costing tens of thousands their credit card information

(credit: HEI Hotels & Resorts) The chain that owns Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt, and Intercontinental hotels—HEI Hotels & Resorts— said this weekend that the payment systems for 20 of its locations had been infected with malware that may have been able to steal tens of thousands of credit card numbers and corresponding customer names, expiration dates, and verification codes. HEI claims that it did not lose control of any customer PINs, as they are not collected by the company’s systems. Still, HEI noted on its website that it doesn’t store credit card details either. “We believe that the malware may have accessed payment card information in real-time as it was being inputted into our systems,” the company said. The breach appears to have hit 20 HEI Hotels, and in most cases, the malware appears to have been active from December 2, 2015 to June 21, 2016. In a few cases, hotels may have been affected as early as March 1, 2015. According to a statement on HEI’s website, the malware affected point-of-sale (POS) terminals at the affected properties, but online booking and other online transactions were not affected. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read More:
20 hotels suffer hack costing tens of thousands their credit card information