The highest number of recorded incidents of Coinhive cryptojacking software have taken place in Brazil, Iran’s country’s cybersecurity authority revealed in a report Monday, October 8. According to the Iranian authority’s report on malware in 2017, Brazil, the country with the most reported cases, has been hit over 81,000 times by Coinhive. India came in second with around 29,000, followed by Indonesia with more than 23,000, while Iran scored about 11,000. Coinhive, the cryptocurrency mining software which mines Monero (XMR), provides an Application Programming Interface (API) to developers, which then lets the developer use a website visitors’ CPU resources to …

Much noise has been made about the untraceable qualities of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin "can be used to buy merchandise anonymously" said early primers on crypto, it offers users the kind of financial privacy that was previously available only from a "Swiss bank account," say more recent commentators. And given its ability to provide people with a layer of anonymity and privacy, it has been smeared by politicians, experts and mainstream journalists alike as a hiding place for almost any hacker, drug dealer, gang member, terrorist or despot you could possibly name (even if cash is still the preferred …

A recent report by security company Banbreach has found that in the past month, the number of routers compromised by cryptojacking software in India has doubled. The report indicates that hackers have cracked over 30,000 routers within the country, Hard Fork reported Oct. 5. Banbreach managed to track Internet traffic and detect all devices on the Internet with public IP addresses, which made it possible to examine traffic passing through routers. In the course of its research, Banbreach grouped populated areas of India into three categories from most to least dense. According to the report, 45 percent of the infected …

Gone are the days when shady dealings in crypto were perceived as immune to the clutches of law enforcement. Illicit crypto proceeds can be shuttled between wallet addresses at the click of a mouse, and their obfuscation behind the multiple strings of numbers and letters of wallet addresses can create a dizzying — if not impenetrable — cryptographic maze for authorities to navigate. But the criminals themselves present a more concrete target, and as they interface with everything from crafty code to unwieldy hardware to ‘traditional’ firearms, there has been some success in 2018 in nabbing some of the year’s …

Major Indian cryptocurrency exchange Zebpay announced it had stopped all trading due to the country’s banking ban. The official announcement was published Thursday, September 27. Citing “extremely difficult” conditions it encountered attempting to process customer orders in the current environment, the exchange gave just several hours’ notice of the decision, which as of press time is already in effect. The move caught many by surprise, coming almost three months after the July 6 deadline for banks to comply with the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) ban on offering services to cryptocurrency businesses. “...We continued to look for solutions as we …

The National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) is testing a blockchain platform developed by Elemential Labs to conduct e-voting for listed companies, local news outlet Hindu BusinessLine reports September 27. The NSE’s pilot will entail tokenizing voting rights and using the blockchain platform to connect the firm, registrar and transfer agents (RTA), and the regulator. Hindu BusinessLine notes that tokenized votes are both easy to transfer and to proxy, and the test will reportedly be used to evaluate how easy it is to audit the entirety of the voting procedure using blockchain. Sankarson Banerjee, CTO of projects at NSE, is …

Tech giant Dell EMC Technologies plans to remain a leader in the Indian server market by introducing products that have blockchain capabilities, local news outlet Economic Times India reports September 26. Dell has identified blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and cloud-compliance as key features that the firm will push forward with in order to retain its edge. According to the Economic Times India, Dell had the highest overall market share of the Indian server market in Q1 2018 at 28.3 percent, up from 19.4 percent in the previous quarter. Manish Gupta, senior director and general manager at Infrastructure Solutions …

India’s Supreme Court will listen to the final round of petitions against the country’s central bank banning cryptocurrency dealings. The hearing is set to happen today, September 25, local news outlet Financial Express reports. The latest step in a lengthy process since the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced the ban in April, multiple appeals have surfaced in the last two months, these stemming from sources throughout the local cryptocurrency industry and beyond. The ban has officially been in force since July 6, Cointelegraph reporting the original deadline for the Court to weigh up its legality being pushed back from …

An American musical prelude Bitconnect, the now-defunct crypto lending and exchange platform that has been ousted as a ruinous Ponzi scheme, has memorably been compared by the Silver Miller law firm to the fleeting 2011 Broadway musical “Wonderland,” based on the dizzying impossibilities of Alice’s adventures in Lewis Carroll’s celebrated novel. Silver Miller’s first class action complaint was filed on behalf of six defrauded Bitconnect investors in late January, just weeks after the Texas Securities Commissioner issued an emergency cease-and-desist order against Bitconnect for the selling of unlicensed securities. The complaint unconventionally opened with the following lyrics: “Welcome to Wonderland …

Official government websites have become a prime target for cryptojacking in India, The Economic Times (ET) reports today, September 17. Cryptojacking is the practice of infecting a target with malware that uses a computer’s processing power to mine for cryptocurrencies without the owner’s consent or knowledge. New research from cybersecurity analysts reportedly reveals that widely trusted government websites – including those of the director of the municipal administration of Andhra Pradesh, Tirupati Municipal Corporation and Macherla municipality – have become the latest to be exploited by the practice. Security Researcher Indrajeet Bhuyan told ET that: “Hackers target government websites for …

The Union Cabinet of India has approved a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on the collaborative research of distributed ledger technology (DLT), local news outlet ANI reported September 12. The Union Cabinet is the supreme decision-making body in India consisting of cabinet ministers and led by the prime minister, Narendra Modi. The MOU, which is a cooperative initiative under the BRICS Interbank Cooperation Mechanism, aims to foster better understanding of DLT and define areas where the technology can be deployed to improve operational efficiency. The research will be jointly conducted by the Export-Import Bank of India (Exim Bank) and banks from …

Authorities from two U.S. states have implored the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in India to seize the property of promoters of Bitcoin (BTC) investment firm BitConnect, the Times of India reported September 11. BitConnect, which ceased its operations in January of this year, was an open-source cryptocurrency and an investment program accused of being a Ponzi scheme. The accusations were based on the multi-level referral system and promise of astronomical returns on customers’ investments. The U.S. states of Illinois and Arizona are asking the CID to seize the property of the promoters, who are suspected of raising Rs 41,000 crore …