Hacker Redirects Traffic From 19 Internet Providers to Steal Bitcoins

Post by baddox » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 9:16 AM UTC

xcubed wrote: post #39

altoz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of money has been lost in other security breaches, oftentimes with much worse consequences because the data is centralized. This hasn't stopped people from shopping at Target for instance. The nice thing is, security breaches in a decentralized network like bitcoin serve to make the entire network anti-fragile. There's a huge incentive for people with bitcoin to secure their own bitcoins against known exploits a…

The difference is that with the Target breach, people knew that they would get their credit card $$ back.

Post by CalRobert » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 9:42 AM UTC

xcubed wrote: post #39

altoz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of money has been lost in other security breaches, oftentimes with much worse consequences because the data is centralized. This hasn't stopped people from shopping at Target for instance. The nice thing is, security breaches in a decentralized network like bitcoin serve to make the entire network anti-fragile. There's a huge incentive for people with bitcoin to secure their own bitcoins against known exploits a…

The difference is that with the Target breach, people knew that they would get their credit card $$ back.

Post by tomp » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 10:07 AM UTC

blazespin wrote: post #9

mrb wrote: 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.

Post by thret » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 10:43 AM UTC

pests wrote: post #38

thaumasiotes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, based on the numbers in the article I do find the level of investment surprising. > Though each redirection lasted just 30 second or so, the thief was able to perform the attack 22 times, each time hijacking and gaining control of the processing power of a group of bitcoin miners > At its peak, according to the researchers’ measurements, the hacker’s scam was pocketing a flow of bitcoins and other digital c…

The half minute window was only required to reprogram mining pools to mine into the attackers pool. The effects of the attack last much longer than the time needed to execute the attack.

Post by cma » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 11:07 AM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #43

xcubed wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that with the Target breach, people knew that they would get their credit card $$ back.

But the way this is implemented is "credit card companies will take 3% of every transaction they perform, and then give back a very small portion of that to counteract fraud". The power we give these organizations - basically a 3% tax on every transaction - is mind boggling.