Tag: street-journal

Italian cryptocurrency exchange BitGrail loses $170 million

One of the biggest problems with cryptocurrency exchanges is that they’re a juicy, enticing target for high-tech criminals. Case in point, Italian exchange BitGrail, which lost $170 million worth of Nano tokens, a little-known digital coin previously called RaiBlocks. BitGrail is the second exchange that lost of massive amount of money this year — and it’s only February — following Tokyo-based Coincheck, which lost between $400 and $534 million worth of coins in a cyberattack on its internet-connected wallet back in January. BitGrail announced on its website that it lost $170 million to fraudulent transactions and that it has already reported them to authorities. It has suspended all withdrawals and deposits “in order to conduct further verifications.” However, unlike Coincheck, which promised to give users their money back, BitGrail founder Francesco “The Bomber” Firano announced on Twitter that there’s no way to refund 100 percent of what users lost. While BitGrail’s loss is in no way as massive as Mt. Gox’s , it’s still steeped in controversy. The Nano team said that they have no “reason to believe the loss was due to an issue in the Nano protocol” and that the “problems appear to be related to BitGrail’s software.” They also published a copy of their conversation with the exchange’s founder and said that Franceso suggested they modify the ledger to cover his losses. It doesn’t help that BitGrail recently required users to verify their accounts to be able to withdraw their coins beyond a certain amount, and some people have reportedly been waiting for verification since December. More recently, the exchange announced that it would no longer serve non-EU users due to what it said are legal complications. Team Nano wrote in their latest statement: “We now have sufficient reason to believe that Firano has been misleading the Nano Core Team and the community regarding the solvency of the BitGrail exchange for a significant period of time.” On Twitter, Francesco said Nano’s claims are nothing but “unfounded allegations.” He added that he told the police that the Nano team published their private convo, which could compromise the investigation. In the wake of the unfounded accusations made against me by the dev team and of the dissemination of private conversations that compromise police investigations, Bitgrail s.r.l. is forced to contact the police in order to protect its rights and users — Francesco The Bomber (@bomberfrancy) February 10, 2018 NANO on BitGrail have been stolen. Unfortunately there is no way to give it back to you at 100% (we only got 4 MLN XRN right now). The devs, as you have guessed, dont want to collaborate — Francesco The Bomber (@bomberfrancy) February 9, 2018 Source: The Wall Street Journal

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Italian cryptocurrency exchange BitGrail loses $170 million

Bitcoin jumps another 10 percent in 24 hours to pass $19,000

Enlarge / A Soyuz rocket launches from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. (credit: NASA) 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. We recently asked two experts on the history of bubbles about bitcoin, and both saw echoes of earlier bubbles in the current bitcoin boom. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitcoin jumps another 10 percent in 24 hours to pass $19,000

FBI tried and failed to unlock 7,000 encrypted devices

In an 11-month period, the FBI failed to gain access to around 7, 000 encrypted mobile devices, BBC News reports , which is about half of those targeted by the agency according to FBI Director Christopher Wray. In a speech given at the Association of Chiefs of Police conference yesterday, he said that device encryption was “a huge, huge problem, ” for the agency. The FBI publicly went after Apple following the 2015 San Bernardino terror attack as it sought access to the shooter’s locked iPhone 5c — a request that Apple staunchly refused . It eventually got around the issue by paying an undisclosed vendor reportedly $900, 000 for software that gave the agency access to the phone. While that incident garnered a lot of attention, it certainly wasn’t the first time the FBI made it clear that encrypted smartphones were a headache for the agency. In 2014, then Director James Comey said that secure communications could lead to “a very dark place” and called on Congress to change the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act accordingly. Further, while the FBI presented the San Bernardino attacker’s phone as a special case of national security, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Justice was pursuing nine similar requests around the same time. Wray said at the conference, “I get it, there’s a balance that needs to be struck between encryption and the importance of giving us the tools we need to keep the public safe.” But as cybersecurity expert Alan Woodward told BBC News , encryption is here to stay. “Encryption that frustrates forensic investigations will be a fact of life from now on for law enforcement agencies, ” he said. “Even if the equipment manufacturers didn’t build in such encryption it would be possible to obtain software that encrypted data in the same way.” Source: BBC News

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FBI tried and failed to unlock 7,000 encrypted devices

Equifax may have been hacked again (updated)

When Equifax’s interim CEO penned a letter of apology on The Wall Street Journal , he admitted that it will take a lot of effort to regain people’s trust. Unfortunately, the company still seems to be lacking when it comes to security, because according to Ars Technica , it’s been hacked yet again. Independent security analyst Randy Abrams told Ars that he was redirected to hxxp:centerbluray.info and was met with a Flash download when he went to equifax.com to contest a false info on his credit report. The fake Flash installer apparently tricks people into downloading what Symantec identifies as Adware.Eorezo , an adware that inundates Internet Explorer with advertisements. Unfortunately, we can’t replicate the problem, but Abrams said he encountered the issue on three separate visits and captured one of them on video: We reached out to Equifax to ask whether the company has already cleaned up the adware downloader. To be safe, though, don’t click on any random Flash installer that pops up when you visit the agency’s website in the near future. Update: Equifax says its IT and security teams are looking into the issue, but while the investigation is in progress, the page has been taken offline. The company plans to share more information as it becomes available. Source: Ars Technica

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Equifax may have been hacked again (updated)

Apple going all-in on original programming, to the tune of $1 billion a year

Apple Music on iOS 10, with Senior VP Eddy Cue. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) As the battle to create original content for online video services continues, we get a glimpse into Apple’s plans for the coming year. According to a  report  from The Wall Street Journal , Apple has a budget of $1 billion to spend in 2018 to “procure and produce” original content. The iPhone maker could acquire and produce up to 10 shows next year with this money, which will be largely left in the hands of  new Apple hires  Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg. Erlicht and Van Amburg are former presidents from Sony Pictures Television that moved to Apple in June to oversee video content strategy and production. The $1 billion budget signals how serious Apple is about boosting its original programming, the newest of which lives on its Apple Music subscription service. This is Apple’s first major push into original content, but $1 billion less than the money spend on content by rival companies. HBO spent about double last year on content (it reportedly costs $10 million to produce one episode of Game of Thrones ), and Netflix may spend upwards of $6 billion this year. Apple’s starting budget is similar to Amazon’s when it first got into original programming in 2013 with Prime Video; Amazon could spend $4.5 billion on original content in 2017. Original programming is the way to go, as it has proven to be a big driver in the growth of streaming services. Netflix’s business benefited immensely from original hits like House of Cards , Orange is the New Black , and Stranger Things . Those kinds of shows—scripted comedies and dramas—are expensive to produce, and we’ve seen Netflix’s annual budget for original programming increase over the past few years to accommodate that. Apple’s first original series, Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke , both just became available to Apple Music subscribers, and critics’ reviews have been mixed. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple going all-in on original programming, to the tune of $1 billion a year

AlphaBay taken down by law enforcement across 3 countries, WSJ says

Enlarge / A bitcoin token stands in this arranged photograph in London, U.K., on Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2017. (credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images ) AlphaBay, one of the largest Tor-hidden drug websites that sprung up in the wake of Silk Road, has been shuttered for good after a series of law enforcement raids and arrests. The site mysteriously went dark earlier this month. Some users on Reddit suspected an “exit scam,” in which AlphaBay’s founders had shuttered the site and absconded with piles of bitcoins. According to the Wall Street Journal , which reported the news on Thursday, police in the United States, Canada, and Thailand collaborated to arrest Alexandre Cazes, who allegedly was the head of the online operation. The Canadian citizen was arrested on July 5 in Thailand, the same day that two raids on residences in Quebec, Canada, were executed. On Wednesday, Cazes was found dead, hanged in his Thai jail cell. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AlphaBay taken down by law enforcement across 3 countries, WSJ says

Tanium exposed hospital’s IT while using its network in sales demos

Enlarge / Orion Hindawi, co-founder and chief technology officer of Tanium Inc. Information security company Tanium is a relatively well-established “next-generation” cybersecurity vendor that was founded 10 years ago—far ahead of the wave of the venture capital-funded newcomers, like Cylance, who have changed the security software space. (Tanium has reached a market valuation of more than $3 billion, though there are no indications of when it will make an initial public offering.) Starting in 2012, Tanium apparently had a secret weapon to help it compete with the wave of newcomers, which the company’s executives used in sales demonstrations: a live customer network they could tap into for product demonstrations.There was just one problem: the customer didn’t know that Tanium was using its network. And since the customer was a hospital, the Tanium demos—which numbered in the hundreds between 2012 and 2015, according to a Wall Street Journal report —exposed live, sensitive information about the hospital’s IT systems. Until recently, some of that data was shown in publicly posted videos. In 2010, Tanium’s software was installed at Allscripts Healthcare Solutions’ El Camino Hospital  (which markets itself as “the hospital of Silicon Valley”) in Santa Clara County, California. The hospital no longer has a relationship with Tanium. While Tanium did not have access to patient data, the demos showed desktop and server management details that were not anonymized. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tanium exposed hospital’s IT while using its network in sales demos

YouTube, Disney come down hard on PewDiePie after anti-Semitic stunt

Enlarge (credit: YouTube Red) A couple of big names are severing ties with Felix Kjellberg, otherwise known as PewDiePie on YouTube. The Wall Street Journal reported that Disney’s Maker Studios dropped PewDiePie from its company, which had previously partnered with the YouTube creator to make the entertainment network Revelmode. Shortly after that announcement, Variety reported that YouTube cancelled the second season of Scare PewDiePie , the YouTube Red show starring Kjellberg, and dropped PewDiePie from Google Preferred, one of the company’s advertising programs for top-tier brands and talent. All of this follows PewDiePie’s video posted last month in which he paid two Indian men to hold up a sign that says “Death to all Jews.” He did this using a site called Fiverr , a freelance website that lets anyone pay for a variety of services—including graphic design and programming—for just $5. One of the services listed at the time was for Funny Guys, a comedy duo consisting of the two Indian men who would hold up a sign with anything written on it for $5. After the initial backlash toward PewDiePie’s video, the YouTube creator posted a follow-up video in which he says he didn’t think the men would actually hold up such an offensive sign. Fiverr banned Funny Guys after the incident; the duo said they didn’t understand what the sign meant at the time. PewDiePie apologized while asking Fiverr to reinstate the men to its website, claiming he felt “partially responsible.” He also responded to the controversy on his Tumblr page this weekend, defending his channel as “entertainment, and not a place for any serious political commentary,” but he also admitted that his previous actions were “ultimately offensive.” PewDiePie is no stranger to offensive content, as most of his videos showcase his bombastic sense of humor, but that hasn’t stopped 53 million people from subscribing to his channel. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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YouTube, Disney come down hard on PewDiePie after anti-Semitic stunt

Amazon plans to build a $1.5 billion air cargo hub in Kentucky

We may be decades away from the flying warehouses Amazon wants to build, but the e-commerce giant is growing its shipping and distribution network in different ways. The company has just announced that it plans to build its first air cargo hub at Northern Kentucky Airport to house its current and future fleet of planes. It’s expected to cost Amazon over $1.5 billion in investment and might eventually have buildings and material-handling equipment. According to The Wall Street Journal , this move signifies that Amazon is “ramping up its expansion into transporting, sorting and delivering its own packages.” When the 2-million-square-foot hub opens, it will certainly reduce the e-retailer’s dependence on UPS and FedEx in the area. It will initially employ 2, 000 people, but it could end up having more personnel. WSJ says Amazon’s end goal is to deliver packages for itself and other retailers — to ultimately become a legit courier and direct competitor to bigger companies like UPS. It helps that the cargo hub’s location is apparently within a couple of days’ drive from a densely populated area. While Amazon doesn’t have a timeline for the air cargo hub yet, it has already begun working on its shipping freight endeavor. A WSJ report from a few days ago revealed that the company has been coordinating shipments of containers from China since October as a freight forwarder. Source: The Wall Street Journal

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Amazon plans to build a $1.5 billion air cargo hub in Kentucky

Amazon is now managing its own ocean freight

Amazon has been working for a while now to build out its shipping and distribution network. Now the online retailer has started coordinating its own shipments from Chinese merchants to its warehouses in the US via ocean freighters. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company doesn’t own any ships, but it’s working as a freight forwarder and logistics provider. These are the companies that reserve space on freighters and handle trucking shipments from port to a warehouse. WSJ says that Amazon has coordinated shipment of 150 containers from China since October. News of Amazon’s intent to get into shipping freight across the ocean first broke last year when the company gained approval from the Federal Maritime Commission to act as a Ocean Transportation Intermediary. During the 2015 holiday season, the retailer bought extra trailers to beef up its shipping capacity at the busiest time of the year. Earlier in 2015, Amazon began leasing planes for the so-called Prime Air that gave it more control over shipping logistics here in the US. Source: The Wall Street Journal

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Amazon is now managing its own ocean freight