Cryptocurrencies & Cybercrime

11 minute read | Last updated 5-Feb-2019 |  Cybercrime

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Bad Robot Transcript

Morning, everybody. How you doing today on this episode of the show. I want to talk to you about how cybercriminals use cryptocurrency in order to make money. And this was prompted by a decent report that came out from a company called chain analysis and they specialize in analyzing blockchain and cryptocurrency transactions to help law enforcement investors and a whole bunch of other interested parties.

I’m really wrap their heads around what’s going on in our public cryptocurrencies. Now their report focused on how cybercriminals and the darknet leveraged cryptocurrencies, and they had some really interesting facts. Now, I would have liked to see a little bit more about their methodology to understand how they were accomplishing these things at one of the things they were looking at was the largest exchange breaches as well as where that money went to that was what really was interesting to me is that they analyzed how cybercriminals than liquidated those assets because the number one challenge when it comes to cryptocurrency from a sort of scale issue.

Around security is the exchanges themselves. So there’s been some pretty famous exchange breeches and we talked about it and season 1 last year on this show as well because at the end of the day cryptocurrency is really just a file that’s sitting on your computer and we’ve seen a number of exchanges so exchanges help you deposit money and then take it out in another currency form or to trade in a help authorized transactions things like this, but they suggest all data sitting on somebody’s computer.

Now there was rumors of here in Canada. I last week that one of the major Canadian exchanges or a large Canadian exchange couldn’t access millions of dollars in assets because the founder passed away and now there was a report that came out that disputed that based on looking at their previous transaction.

So it’s just a reminder that these are just digital files that need to be protected and us can be hacked as well. And that was part of this point from chain analysis now interesting enough and the data from Trend Micro over 2017. I’m just watching the end of 2017 Nissan massive Spike and it continued throughout 2018 that cybercriminals are trying a crime or scam called stack cryptojacking essentially what this is is that they are going to try to take over your system or your web browser in order to mine cryptocurrency.

So the way cryptocurrency works is essentially your computer needs to guess a whole bunch of numbers to find a valid one on the chain in order create new currency. So instead of just you know being able to buy and sell what you absolutely can do if you want to generate new currency in the economy.

You need to mine it which is why there was this run on GPU so last couple years but interesting to know if that’s really expensive to mine for cryptocurrency. In fact for Bitcoin, it’s currently not worth it to mine Bitcoin is trading less of the average value of finding a Bitcoin through Mining and if there is not that far off, so there’s these challenges around cryptocurrency and how to continue to make money here will cybercriminals.

It figured out that it doesn’t cost them. Anything to use your resources to mine cryptocurrency, that’s exactly what’s happening. Now. I thought that was a little interesting cuz that was missing for the chain analysis report date a fantastic thing looking at the analysis of a Pax into major exchanges the breakdown of how cybercriminals liquidate and turn those assets into something they can use was really good but they missed that one area of the fact that criminals are basically mining legitimate big quotes around legitimate crypto coin and by leveraging other people’s resources now that’s a really difficult thing to track because you need to figure out what wallets are being used as part of this malware scheme, but that’s another way that cryptocurrency is being leveraged by cybercriminals because at the end of the day, they’re trying to make money and if this is an automated way that they can make money under absolutely going to take advantage of that now on the defense side and research side of the law enforcement side, it’s really interesting because all these transactions are public and they’re all in a very easy.

No computer accessible form, which means Organizations and research seems like they want to chain analysis can do this type of breakdown saying like 8, we saw this one exchange breach. And here’s where all those funds went and yet they can’t do that. Final step was why they work with law enforcement White Law Enforcement required of once that money or those.

Value leaves the system. What is a really really interesting work? But I think you know for most people out there the day today is to ensure that your endpoints are far more secure or secure your money good endpoint security tools to ensure that you were machines aren’t being used to mine cryptocurrency.

And then on the flip side, if you are active in the cryptocurrency community, make sure that you use an exchange that has a really high internal security standard. So they are securing their back end of systems strongly. They’re actively monitoring all their security controls are actively backing things up.

So you avoid this potential an issue where a somebody has a password bypass. I’m if that was in fact the case and you avoid this issue of a hacker simply stealing a bunch of files and all of a sudden they’ve got millions of dollars. World, I think you will cryptocurrency is still shaking out as seen by the fluctuations with Bitcoin, but there’s also a absolute value in the back-end ideas.

I’m in the technology and there’s just a lot of stuff. We need to learn in this is part of it. I am I linked to all the stuff. I’ve been talking about down below as always interested in what your thoughts are on the subject. Hit me up online at Mark MCA those who own the blogs in the comments down below and as always for podcast listener and everybody else by email me at Mark end.

CA have yourself a wonderful day and we’ll see you on the next show. Morning, everybody. How you doing today on this episode of the show. I want to talk to you about how cybercriminals use cryptocurrency in order to make money. And this was prompted by a decent report that came out from a company called chain analysis and they specialize in analyzing blockchain and cryptocurrency transactions to help law enforcement investors and a whole bunch of other interested parties.

I’m really wrap their heads around what’s going on in our public cryptocurrencies. Now their report focused on how cybercriminals and the darknet leveraged cryptocurrencies, and they had some really interesting facts. Now, I would have liked to see a little bit more about their methodology to understand how they were accomplishing these things at one of the things they were looking at was the largest exchange breaches as well as where that money went to that was what really was interesting to me is that they analyzed how cybercriminals than liquidated those assets because the number one challenge when it comes to cryptocurrency from a sort of scale issue.

Around security is the exchanges themselves. So there’s been some pretty famous exchange breeches and we talked about it and season 1 last year on this show as well because at the end of the day cryptocurrency is really just a file that’s sitting on your computer and we’ve seen a number of exchanges so exchanges help you deposit money and then take it out in another currency form or to trade in a help authorized transactions things like this, but they suggest all data sitting on somebody’s computer.

Now there was rumors of here in Canada. I last week that one of the major Canadian exchanges or a large Canadian exchange couldn’t access millions of dollars in assets because the founder passed away and now there was a report that came out that disputed that based on looking at their previous transaction.

So it’s just a reminder that these are just digital files that need to be protected and us can be hacked as well. And that was part of this point from chain analysis now interesting enough and the data from Trend Micro over 2017. I’m just watching the end of 2017 Nissan massive Spike and it continued throughout 2018 that cybercriminals are trying a crime or scam called stack cryptojacking essentially what this is is that they are going to try to take over your system or your web browser in order to mine cryptocurrency.

So the way cryptocurrency works is essentially your computer needs to guess a whole bunch of numbers to find a valid one on the chain in order create new currency. So instead of just you know being able to buy and sell what you absolutely can do if you want to generate new currency in the economy.

You need to mine it which is why there was this run on GPU so last couple years but interesting to know if that’s really expensive to mine for cryptocurrency. In fact for Bitcoin, it’s currently not worth it to mine Bitcoin is trading less of the average value of finding a Bitcoin through Mining and if there is not that far off, so there’s these challenges around cryptocurrency and how to continue to make money here will cybercriminals.

It figured out that it doesn’t cost them. Anything to use your resources to mine cryptocurrency, that’s exactly what’s happening. Now. I thought that was a little interesting cuz that was missing for the chain analysis report date a fantastic thing looking at the analysis of a Pax into major exchanges the breakdown of how cybercriminals liquidate and turn those assets into something they can use was really good but they missed that one area of the fact that criminals are basically mining legitimate big quotes around legitimate crypto coin and by leveraging other people’s resources now that’s a really difficult thing to track because you need to figure out what wallets are being used as part of this malware scheme, but that’s another way that cryptocurrency is being leveraged by cybercriminals because at the end of the day, they’re trying to make money and if this is an automated way that they can make money under absolutely going to take advantage of that now on the defense side and research side of the law enforcement side, it’s really interesting because all these transactions are public and they’re all in a very easy.

No computer accessible form, which means Organizations and research seems like they want to chain analysis can do this type of breakdown saying like 8, we saw this one exchange breach. And here’s where all those funds went and yet they can’t do that. Final step was why they work with law enforcement White Law Enforcement required of once that money or those.

Value leaves the system. What is a really really interesting work? But I think you know for most people out there the day today is to ensure that your endpoints are far more secure or secure your money good endpoint security tools to ensure that you were machines aren’t being used to mine cryptocurrency.

And then on the flip side, if you are active in the cryptocurrency community, make sure that you use an exchange that has a really high internal security standard. So they are securing their back end of systems strongly. They’re actively monitoring all their security controls are actively backing things up.

So you avoid this potential an issue where a somebody has a password bypass. I’m if that was in fact the case and you avoid this issue of a hacker simply stealing a bunch of files and all of a sudden they’ve got millions of dollars. World, I think you will cryptocurrency is still shaking out as seen by the fluctuations with Bitcoin, but there’s also a absolute value in the back-end ideas.

I’m in the technology and there’s just a lot of stuff. We need to learn in this is part of it. I am I linked to all the stuff. I’ve been talking about down below as always interested in what your thoughts are on the subject. Hit me up online at Mark MCA those who own the blogs in the comments down below and as always for podcast listener and everybody else by email me at Mark end.

CA have yourself a wonderful day and we’ll see you on the next show.