Bitcoin Thefts Surge, DDoS Hackers Take Millions - InformationWeek

[Tom Johnson]

Bitcoin Thefts Surge, DDoS Hackers Take Millions

Cryptographic currency's massive rise in value leads to a corresponding increase in online heists by criminals seeking easy paydays.

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Say you've created a cryptographic currency called bitcoin that promises users relative anonymity and untraceable transactions. What could possibly go wrong? The answer, of course, is that these virtues also appeal to hackers, malware developers, and organized crime rings who wouldn't think twice about committing virtual bank robberies.

Earlier this month, for example, Bitcoin Internet Payment System (BIPS), a Denmark-based Bitcoin payment processor, suffered a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Unfortunately for users of the company's free online wallets for storing bitcoins, the DDoS attack was merely a smokescreen for a digital heist that quickly drained numerous wallets, netting the attackers a reported 1,295 bitcoins -- worth nearly $1 million -- and leaving wallet users with little chance that they'd ever see their money again.  See http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks-and-breaches/bitcoin-thefts-surge-ddos-hackers-take-millions/d/d-id/1112831

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[Arlo Barnes]

Dan Kaminsky has a blog post (http://dankaminsky.com/2011/08/05/bo2k11/) in which he presents some slides he had shown at DefCon that are partly about Bitcoins. He points out that while BTC may seem anonymous it is conceptually about as far from that as you can get, because all transactions are known by everybody, with addresses attached. Of course a person can have multiple addresses and hypothetically multiple people could share an address, but that does not make it immune to clever data mining (data minting? :P).

Anyway, I clicked on the image to see what kind of monitor has such a weird aspect ratio - turns out the thumbnail image had just distorted it for some reason.

-Arlo James Barnes

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