HACKERS SET THEIR SIGHT ON BITCOIN: Russian cybercriminals organize secret competitions for stealing cryptocurrencies

In the past, we have seen numerous examples of how some owners of cryptocurrencies were left without them due to complete negligence.

Approximately three to four million Bitcoin coins are gone forever, not including how many were stolen.
During the hacking of Mt. Gox, more than 850,000 Bitcoins have been stolen, and it is known that about 120,000 BTC were stolen in 2016 from the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange. That comes to 970,000 BTC, while the total amount stolen is not known. Take into account that a few weeks ago, Bitcoin was worth more than 60,000, while its current value is less than 40,000, which means that there is a lot of money in the game.

According to the security company Intel 471, Russian secret "underground" forums have organized a competition with a prize fund of 100,000 dollars, in which people are trying to find a way to attack technology related to cryptocurrencies. This so-called competition required the methods to cover everything from stealing digital private keys, stealing digital wallets holding cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, to submitting "unusual" cryptocurrency mining software, and others. proposals concerning smart contracts (a set of rights and obligations expressed in digital form, with defined rules within which the contracting parties fulfill the contractual obligations) and NFT.

The competition started on April 20, while all the proposals were accepted in the next 30 days, so that the administrators of that forum could increase the prize fund by another 15,000 dollars, reports ZDNet. Some papers, ie applications, were published on these forums for evaluation by other users, and they could be seen manipulating the API (application programming interface) that uses cryptocurrency platforms, as well as phishing websites that collect keys, seed phrases (a list of words that can be used to access a cryptocurrency wallet) and much more.

Such forum competitions are not new, in the past, there were similar forums that looked for software vulnerabilities in ATMs or POS (point-of-sale) exploitation. Still, the competition that focuses on cryptocurrencies shows how virtual currencies can be lucrative.

Bradon Fuller (an engineer who worked on the Bitcoin protocol) hid for two years the vulnerability of the Bitcoin Core program through which the main BTC blockchain could be broken, including other Bcoin, Btcd, and similar blockchains. Bitcoin Core is programmed to decide which blockchain contains valid transactions. That vulnerability was corrected before other researchers realized that there was a problem and disclosed it to the public.

At the beginning of February this year, many technology companies had security vulnerabilities (Microsoft Exchange Server zero-days, behind that attack, is a hacker group from North Korea - Lazarus), which enabled the installation of cryptocurrency mining software on compromised computers via a botnet.

By: Olivia J. - Gossip Whispers