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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.
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.
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.