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A teenager who said he succeeded in hacking Ledger’s hardware wallets can still do so, he claims, despite the company denying it.
Cryptocurrency hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger continues to refute claims its devices can be hacked after a teenager compromised them, Ars Technica reports today, March 21.
After British 15-year-old Saleem Rashid created code to ‘backdoor’ Ledger’s wallets in November 2017, the company released posts describing the events as “NOT critical” and said possible attacks “cannot extract the private keys or the seed.”
Rashid then refuted the claims on social media and a post on his personal blog entitled “Breaking the Ledger Security Model” March 20, stating he could still “autonomously extract the root private key once the user unlocks the device” and use to it instigate manipulation of destination addresses for transactions.
The argument puts pressure on both Ledger and its millions of users, who had until now broadly accepted the company’s claims its wallets were 100% secure.
Hardware wallets are often recommended by the Bitcoin industry’s best-known names, including educator Andreas Antonopoulos, who like many others attempts to dissuade cryptocurrency investors from online storage of funds.
Ledger attempted to patch a total of three security vulnerabilities in its hardware this month, including that identified by Rashid.…
A July deadline has been mostly agreed upon by the G20 Nations for recommendations towards Global regulations for Cryptocurrencies
Late last year, when interest in Bitcoin and its price was at its peak, France’s finance minister suggested that there be a public debate of Bitcoin at the G20 summit which concluded this week.
The conclusion of this meeting, in regards to where the nations now stand on cryptocurrencies, is that a firm July deadline has been put forward for recommendations on how to regulate cryptocurrencies globally.
There was some general uptake and interest in approaching this hitherto unknown and confusing space as countries had, up until now been forging forward mostly on their own in terms of regulations.
However, as the conference kicked off, the buck was soon slowed as the Financial Stability Board (FSB) - which coordinates financial regulation for the Group of 20 Economies - resisted calls from some G20 members to discuss regulating cryptocurrencies at the conference.
Instead, many of the member states, but also a few notable exceptions, decided that cryptocurrencies needed to be examined further, and that more information was needed before any regulations could be proposed.
Therefore the first steps have been laid as July will see G20 nations bringing forward their data and information to begin recommendations on how to go about globally regulating cryptocurrencies.
Baby steps
The announcement came from Argentina Central Bank chair Federico Sturzenegger who said:
"In July we have to offer very concrete, very specific recommendations on not 'what do we regulate?'…
The NSA reportedly tracks down cryptocurrency users with secret internet surveillance programs, allowing them to link Bitcoin wallets to users.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) is reportedly able to locate senders and receivers of Bitcoin around the world, as classified documents provided by Edward Snowden reveal, The Intercept reports March 20.
The sources used for this article were disclosed to The Intercept, a publication dedicated to ‘adversarial journalism’ founded by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill following Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass reconnaissance in 2013.
The NSA managed this by creating a system for harvesting, analyzing, and processing raw global internet traffic using a program disguised as a popular anonymizing software, according to other documents dating March 2013.
OAKSTAR and MONKEYROCKET
Though the agency was interested in monitoring some competing cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (“a decentralized digital currency system, wherein the units are known as Bitcoin or BTC”) was its primary target.
Tracking was performed by means of a secret internet surveillance program under the code name OAKSTAR, which represents a range of covert corporate partnerships that enabled the agency to monitor communications and pull data directly from the fiber optic connections that form the internet undergird.
A VPN-like service called MONKEYROCKET, a subprogram of OAKSTAR, played a crucial role in identifying Bitcoin users.…
Despite China’s regulatory restrictions on cryptocurrencies, two entrepreneurs have shown they see a future in the country’s crypto markets.
While China has spent the past year implementing a series of prohibiting regulations that have made it almost impossible for the cryptocurrency industry to thrive within the country, Chinese crypto enthusiasts have not let government regulation prevent them from moving forward with crypto and Blockchain innovation.
Operating in China within the limits of the many restrictions related to crypto — from the ban of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and domestic fiat-crypto exchanges in September 2017, to the additional January ban of “exchange-like services”, to the February ban of foreign exchanges — is reportedly not impossible.
However, in light of these restrictions, many of China’s top exchanges and other crypto businesses have been forced to relocate to places with more tolerant policies, generally still within Asia, such as Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore.
However, there are some Chinese innovators that see a future in the country’s crypto and Blockchain markets, regardless or in spite of current limitations for operating there.…
