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Bitcoinica Breach Nets Hackers $87,000 In Bitcoins
dynamo52 sends this quote from Ars about a breach involving a Bitcoin exchange:
"More than $87,000 worth of the virtual currency known as Bitcoin was stolen after online bandits penetrated servers belonging to Bitcoinica, prompting its operators to temporarily shutter the trading platform to contain the damage. Friday's theft came after hackers accessed Bitcoinica's production servers and depleted its online wallet of 18,547 BTC, as individual Bitcoin units are called, company officials said in a blog post published on Friday. It said the heist affected only a small fraction of Bitcoinica's overall bitcoin deposits and that all withdrawal requests will be honored once the platform reopens."
Reader linhares points out a forum post discussing how the attacker(s) hinted at a 'mass leak' in the near future. This attack comes shortly after a leak of a different sort — an FBI document (PDF) about Bitcoin found it way onto the internet. It seems they're worried about the virtual currency's potential use in criminal activities.
From https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=a5fdf1db75465f52e9f1ebb06e67b70e&topic=81045.380:
"The root cause of this problem is an email server compromise. The email server belongs to one of our team members."
Really? Does their server really send (unencrypted) emails with root passwords to their entire system? Or did the email server just happend to have root access? I don't even know what possibility is worst.
...That the concept of Bitcoins, nor the encryption behind it, nor anything like that is being breached.
It's always some kind of security breach that allows malicious folk to get the coins themselves. Or people that get their coins stolen from a leaky windhose box. Something like that.
So that is cudo`s for Bitcoin huh? I mean, I never heard some story like "hackers have found a way to create Bitcoins without all the hassle (and made it into a nice gui-ed program)" Enter the amount you wish, hit 'generate' and within 2 seconds your bitcoins are ready to be used.
It is a solid piece of work isn't it?
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Another Bitcoin story, another opportunity to learn about pyramid schemes and how they never work out for most people...
"It is completely incorrect to describe Bitcoin as a 'pyramid scheme.' Technically, it’s a 'pump-and-dump.'"
From: http://newstechnica.com/2011/06/18/bitcoin-to-revolutionise-the-economy/
Ironically, Bitcoin serves as a pretty good argument that there should be substantial regulation of financial service providers since people that don't know computers keep losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"The root cause of this problem is an email server compromise. The email server belongs to one of our team members."
A poorly secured email server is not the failure in this statement.
The failure is what was a non-essential piece of software, what sounds like someone's personal software, doing on this server or even on the same firewalled subnet?
If Bitcoin were a pump and dump don't you think it would have disappeared after the initial bubble? The fact that it continues to grow in transaction volume and in price stability doesn't count for anything?
Hey there, while you're on the topic of security, couldja not include your session ID in a URL you post? Makes you look sorta stupid. Try this instead, guys.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Bitcoin was an interesting experiment.
I was one of the lucky ones- I got in before Bitcoin hit prime time for its 15 minutes of fame. Back then mining actually got you something worthwhile when you could dedicate a couple of GPUs and one or two computers to it (back then FPGAs weren't even being discussed that much). It managed to pay for four separate computers, which I later overhauled and replaced the motherboards on so I could stuff three GPUs in each. A few months ago I decided to shut it down (after witnessing random things like the rollback of an entire market because someone sold too many BTCs and it pissed off the big guys who lost a lot of money because they didn't see it coming) and started to cash out. At the end of it all (after I sold my equipment- though that only accounted for ~10% of my total catch), I'd made enough to pay off my car and both me and my fiancee went on a nice trip to Maui for two weeks.
A friend recently "discovered" BTC and came to me for information on "how to get rich quick". It took me over two hours to convince him that it wasn't worth it anymore, that he could probably pump a good $10K into equipment and not even make back the money power would cost him to run it all. You'd have to invest ten times that into exotic FPGA hardware just to make any reasonable amount of income, and even then I doubt you'll ever pay for the hardware itself before the system completely crashes.
BTC is, ultimately, a failed experiment. Now that the system has gotten rolling there is little reason to use it for anything other then illegal goods, and nobody wants to be associated with a currency that is predominantly used to move dirty money or pay for black market items. I suppose things might be a bit better if we actually had reasonable exchanges running, but for the most part what is out there right now (including MtGox- which formerly stood for "Magic the Gathering Online eXchange") is just about as untrustworthy as the people using it.
If you're a potential miner, my advice is to stay away from BTC. If you weren't there when it started, then you're basically not going to make any money. Those few elites still making money off the system will soon leave as the entire thing becomes unprofitable for even them, and then when they cash out the entire system will crash hard- and any BTC you might own will be worth nothing.
-AC
https://www.paypal.com
Geeks have trouble with this concept, they get all overly literal about shit and think that if something is ok to do under any condition, it is ok to do under all conditions.
That is, of course, not the case. In the law, intent quite often matters. Also what you actually do with it matters as well. If you actually go and buy drugs with the alternate currency you bought then yes, that can be used as evidence of money laundering.
The other part of the problem is that geeks seem to have trouble with the concept of "reasonable doubt" at times. They think if they can cook up any alternate explanation for an action, no matter how far fetched, a jury should have to accept it and they'd get off. Again, not how it works. It isn't beyond any doubt, just beyond a reasonable one.
So yes, if you buy bitcoins for the purpose of buying drugs, they could nail you for money laundering and likely make it stick.
I continue to operate my bitcoin business selling stickers, shirts, and things of interest to bitcoiners. Now it has been a year and it is still growing each month. I sell stuff for bitcoin and buy other things I need or simply cash out via local trade (for USD). I have about 1/3 the fees of PayPal and far less risk. This allows me to sell to people overseas much more safely and as it turns out about half my sales are overseas.
Bitcoin works for me.
When the Internet Fun Bucks are specifically made to be a libertarian free market ideal of untraceable cash, yes.
And they're not designed to be untraceable.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Not just financial service providers either. Apparently the #1 seller on Silk Road, the anonymous drugs marketplace, recently did a runner with the Bitcoins he was paid over the 4/20 rush and didn't actually fulfill any of his orders. Turns out that anonymous reputation systems aren't sufficient to protect against scammers. Whoever would have guessed?
So why post anonymously? I never heard a better post for justifying a link to your shop.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.