Lifeboat Foundation

A new peer-to-peer botnet named Panchan appeared in the wild around March 2022, targeting Linux servers in the education sector to mine cryptocurrency.

Panchan is empowered with SSH worm functions like dictionary attacks and SSH key abuse to perform rapid lateral movement to available machines in the compromised network.

At the same time, it has powerful detection avoidance capabilities, such as using memory-mapped miners and dynamically detecting process monitoring to stop the mining module immediately.

Security researchers have uncovered a large-scale malicious operation that uses trojanized mobile cryptocurrency wallet applications for Coinbase, MetaMask, TokenPocket, and imToken services.

The malicious activity has been identified earlier this year in March. Researchers at Confiant named this activity cluster SeaFlower and describe it as “the most technically sophisticated threat targeting web3 users, right after the infamous Lazarus Group.”

In a recent report, Confiant notes that the malicious cryptocurrency apps are identical to the real ones but they come with a backdoor that can steal the users’ security phrase for accessing the digital assets.

Instead, it tanked and is now virtually worthless.

That crash reignited calls for new rules to govern a cryptocurrency market that is still something of a wild frontier. And now we have perhaps the biggest step yet toward new crypto regulation.

Two senators — a Republican and a Democrat — teamed up to unveil a broad new regulatory bill last week. But skeptics are already warning it’s a step backwards and is far too crypto-friendly.

Cybercriminals are impersonating popular crypto platforms such as Binance, Celo, and Trust Wallet with spoofed emails and fake login pages in an attempt to steal login details and deceptively transfer virtual funds.

“As cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) become more mainstream, and capture headlines for their volatility, there is a greater likelihood of more individuals falling victim to fraud attempting to exploit people for digital currencies,” Proofpoint said in a new report.

“The rise and proliferation of cryptocurrency has also provided attackers with a new method of financial extraction.”

Ethereum, the world’s most used cryptocurrency blockchain network, passed a milestone test ahead of a highly anticipated technical upgrade without any major glitches.

Developers ran the latest software for the upgrade known as the Merge on Ropsten, which is one of the oldest so-called testnets of the network. The testnets are used by developers to find potential bugs and glitches before moving their applications to the blockchain. While the Merge has been carried out on other testnets earlier this year, Ropsten was seen as providing the most realistic technical environment and the best estimate for the outcome of the final process.

Following an early morning vote in Albany on Friday, lawmakers in New York passed a bill to ban certain bitcoin mining operations that run on carbon-based power sources. The measure now heads to the desk of Governor Kathy Hochul, who could sign it into law or veto it.

If Hochul signs the bill, it would make New York the first state in the country to ban blockchain technology infrastructure, according to Perianne Boring, founder and president of the Chamber of Digital Commerce. Industry insiders also tell CNBC it could have a domino effect across the U.S., which is currently at the forefront of the global bitcoin mining industry, accounting for 38% of the world’s miners.

The New York bill, which previously passed the State Assembly in late April before heading to the State Senate, calls for a two-year moratorium on certain cryptocurrency mining operations which use proof-of-work authentication methods to validate blockchain transactions. Proof-of-work mining, which requires sophisticated gear and a whole lot of electricity, is used to create bitcoin. Ethereum is switching to a less energy-intensive process, but will still use this method for at least for another few months.

When reading about the emerging cryptoworld and the new opportunities presented by blockchain technology, you may be enchanted by rags-to-riches stories with billions made overnight, or perhaps be horrified by scams, where the founders of fraudulent projects skip off to Tahiti with their investor’s money. However, it’s doubtful that the first thing that pops into your mind will be grizzly tales of extortion, kidnapping, and even murder. But for blockchain pioneers, falling victim to these horrific crimes is a very real risk that they must be wary about every day.

The explosive profit potential of cryptocurrencies has attracted a myriad of extortionists, scammers, and outright criminals over the years since Bitcoin was first launched in January of 2009. Some developers have had their companies’ reputations damaged by such conmen, and some have ended up beaten, kidnapped, and even killed.

One business that found itself the target of such nefarious opportunists was a Singapore-based company called Skycoin, which is still dealing with the fallout from these attacks to this day. After taking the rather innocuous decision to hire a marketing company to do PR and improve their website, the project and its co-founder found themselves caught in a web of blackmail, deceit, and crime that most people would only encounter in a crime thriller directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Blockchain technology is spreading like fire across industries and businesses. It is currently used in digital voting, medical recordkeeping, decentralized finance, gaming, capital markets, supply chain management, etc. More and more businesses and individual users want to take advantage of blockchain to increase transparency, security, and communication. To leverage blockchain development in innovative use cases, organizations need to comprehend the programming languages best suited for their upcoming projects. Here are the top 5 hottest blockchain programming languages that are being utilized by start-ups and enterprises today.

A high-level programming language is getting more popularity as a blockchain developer language, particularly for dApps development. If you are looking for a language for developing smart contracts on Ethereum Blockchain, Solidity is the one. It is a contract-based language, allowing to store all the logic in the code of the Blockchain.

With amazing code portability, it is the most popular programming language among application developers. It has been used to create smart contracts such as Truffle, ARK, and some of the popular blockchains that are developed using Java include Ethereum, IOTA, NEM, and NEO.

This March, we, a group of educators, scientists, and psychologists started an educational non-profit (501 c3) Earthlings Hub, helping kids in refugee camps and evacuated orphanages. We are getting lots of requests for help, and are in urgent need to raise funds. If you happen to have any connections to educational and humanitarian charities, or if your universities or companies may be interested in providing some financial support to our program, we would really appreciate that! Please share with everyone who might be able to offer help or advice.

Our advisory board includes NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff, Professor Uri Wilensky, early math educator Maria Droujkova, AI visionary Joscha Bach, and others.

Support Us The Earthlings Hub works with a fiscal sponsor Blue Marble Space. CREDIT CARD & PAYPAL Please contact us if you would like to via other means, such as checks, stocks, cryptocurrency, or using your Donor Advised Fund: hello@earthlingshub.org