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Hacker Redirects Traffic From 19 Internet Providers to Steal Bitcoins

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Re: Hacker Redirects Traffic From 19 Internet Providers to Steal Bitcoins

#4
I work in InfoSec and it is mind-boggling to see the sophistication levels of some of the Bitcoin heists, like this BGP incident. When was the last time you saw a BGP attack? 99.9% of real-world attacks don't even bother targetting such a core routing service. Another example: in March 2012, internal Linode management infrastructure was compromised to steal 47k BTC: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=67 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/02/linode_bitcoin_heist... This means attackers had effectively root access to any Linode's customers' VM! When was the last time you saw an entire cloud provider environment being compromised?

I like to see it as ISPs and cloud providers increasing their security and patching vulnerabilities thanks to Bitcoin's growing adoption :)

Re: Hacker Redirects Traffic From 19 Internet Providers to Steal Bitcoins

#8
post #4

I work in InfoSec and it is mind-boggling to see the sophistication levels of some of the Bitcoin heists, like this BGP incident. When was the last time you saw a BGP attack? 99.9% of real-world attacks don't even bother targetting such a core routing service. Another example: in March 2012, internal Linode management infrastructure was compromised to steal 47k BTC: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=67 http://www.theregiste…

It is incredible, the equivalent of the "Oceans" movies but electronic instead. For everyone one of these sophisticated attacks there is a huge number of smash and grabs.

Really interesting stuff. It is only getting better as well (imho). I am honestly not noticing any increase in security aptitude in the average engineer. People are still making the same mistakes.

Re: Hacker Redirects Traffic From 19 Internet Providers to Steal Bitcoins

#9
post #4

I work in InfoSec and it is mind-boggling to see the sophistication levels of some of the Bitcoin heists, like this BGP incident. When was the last time you saw a BGP attack? 99.9% of real-world attacks don't even bother targetting such a core routing service. Another example: in March 2012, internal Linode management infrastructure was compromised to steal 47k BTC: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=67 http://www.theregiste…

It's a fundamental problem with bitcoin in that it hugely incentivizes computer hacking. The more widespread bitcoin and blockchain becomes, the greater the incentive. There will be a lot of collateral damage from all this.

Re: Hacker Redirects Traffic From 19 Internet Providers to Steal Bitcoins

#10
post #4

I work in InfoSec and it is mind-boggling to see the sophistication levels of some of the Bitcoin heists, like this BGP incident. When was the last time you saw a BGP attack? 99.9% of real-world attacks don't even bother targetting such a core routing service. Another example: in March 2012, internal Linode management infrastructure was compromised to steal 47k BTC: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=67 http://www.theregiste…

It's a fundamental problem with bitcoin in that it hugely incentivizes computer hacking. The more widespread bitcoin and blockchain becomes, the greater the incentive. There will be a lot of collateral damage from all this.

The same thing can be said about credit cards. If there is a problem with Bitcoin (and I'm not sure that there is) it is that unlike with credit cards there is no possible recovery of stolen coins.
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