Blockchain News

Crypto Hack Victim Wins Case After Sim Swap Attack, Gains $75 Million

Published

3 months ago

May 12, 2019

Stefan

Crypto hack victim Michael Terpin won the case in California’s Supreme Court and received an award of $75.8 million. The investor and entrepreneur sued a man who he claims stole his crypto assets and we are about to find out more in the latest cryptocurrency news.

Terpin is also pursuing damages from AT&T and other members who were defending the 21-year old criminal. The defendant Nicolas Truglia is currently living in New York and has been arrested for six other crimes. The investigation shows that he and his gang were involved in crypto-related activities some of them were still on-going when he was arrested.

However, despite being awarded and winning the case, Terpin is not stopping here. The blockchain entrepreneur and crypto hack victim will be suing AT&T for an additional $224 million. He pointed out in a statement:

“We, of course, are still actively pursuing our federal court case against AT&T, whose gross negligence we contend allowed these crimes to occur.’’

Truglia was a part of a criminal gang that used the SIM swapping method which was called ‘’The Community.’’ SIM swapping is when someone takes control over your phone and phone number and swaps it with a new SIM. It also requires gathering data on the target and then getting a new SIM card with the victim’s name and phone number. As it was explained by Andrew Blaich:

“There are many public cases of attackers social engineering their way through a cellular company’s representative to get a SIM card issued for an account the attacker doesn’t own or have access to. It appears to be easy to do as all you need is a willing/susceptible representative at any cellular phone store.”

SIM Swapping usually targets the customer’s service that uses SMS notification since the messages are not encrypted. AT&T has a SIM swapping prevention system which is ironic given the case. Michael Terpin was reportedly provided high-risk protection. That number was only known to the victim and his wife, as the altcoin news reported. The court documents stated:

“Even after AT&T had placed vaunted additional protection on his account after an earlier hacking incident, an imposter posing as Mr. Terpin was able to easily obtain Mr. Terpin’s telephone number from an insider cooperating with the hacker without the AT&T store employee requiring him to present valid identification or to give Mr. Terpin’s required password.”

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Stefan

Stefan has been a Bitcoin Specialist for over 5 years. Providing daily news and updates for DC Forecasts.

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Blockchain News

Silvergate Bank Will Expand Services Including Cryptocurrency Lending

Published

8 hours ago

August 20, 2019

Stefan

Silvergate bank will expand its services which will include cryptocurrency lending according to the latest IPO filing which we are reading more about in the latest cryptocurrency news below. The Silvergate bank provides financial services to some of the top companies in the industry such as BitStamp, Xapo, and Coinbase and according to the recent IPO filing from the company they saw increased demand for the crypto-backed loans from other companies that operate with Bitcoin. As a response to that, the company is now looking to offer fiat loans to the clients using cryptocurrencies as the collateral. Silvergate bank uses the Silvergate Exchange network which is a system designed to facilitate transactions between the crypto exchanges and clients. On top of the loans, Silvergate has also expressed a lot of interest in adding stablecoins to its systems since they are not working with them at the moment but according to the document they are holding USD deposits backing several stablecoins. The Silvergate bank is also considering getting a NY State BitLicense in the previous filings because they want to launch trust companies and become a custodian for institutional crypto funds. One of the most important things for investors is the lack of infrastructure that surrounds the cryptocurrency industry. The custodianship issues and regulatory uncertainties are among the main reasons that make the investors understandably cautious. Once these issues are resolved in a robust manner, we could expect to see some much more money flowing in the bitcoin space. Silvergate wants to solve these issues that are not up to the government to solve by providing a framework for legacy institutions to maintain and purchase securely cryptocurrency funds. Despite Silvergate bank as we read in the altcoin news there is another leader in the industry-Coinbase with their new Coinbase Custody service. The CEO of the company has talked on Twitter about how the new service will work and stated that more than $200 million is invested from institutional investors on a weekly basis. The crypto-backed loans could be something that will convince the institutional investors who have been sitting outside of the game that Bitcoin is here to stay but more importantly is a safe alternative investment class.

Blockchain News

Telegram Open Network Will Finally Launch On October 31st

Published

22 hours ago

August 19, 2019

Stefan

Telegram open network, the long-awaited blockchain of Telegram will finally launch at the end of October according to the reports in the coming altcoin news we have today. The gram tokens of the network are still yet-to-be issued and are now trading in an unauthorized secondary market. The company still has to publicly acknowledge the project but the investors in the last year’s $1.7 billion token offerings are now seemingly selling their gram allocations via the OTC desks, exchanges and similar. Buying tokens this way could be very risky according to investors as Telegram prohibited investors from re-selling their allocations under a penalty when terminating the contract. The secondary market has improved for the future token of the Telegram open network and between the OTC desks, sales on small crypto exchanges and investments funds, the opportunity to buy tokens before launch date are hard to find. The investors who bought into the Telegram’s $1.7 billion offerings back in February and March are now not allowed to pledge or sell their tokens in any way before the launch. The original purchase agreement says that if some investors dispose of their future tokens before the Telegram Open Network or TON is life and the allocation can be canceled. One of the investors stated:

“Telegram was the first big project that legally prohibited investors from selling their allocation. Investors usually just share their allocations with friends, without signing documents.’’

The purchase agreement which was written for Telegram by the US legal powerhouse Skadden, Slate, Meagher, and Glom LLP according to one investor stipulates that the buyers of grams may not offer pledge, swap, sell and encumber or dispose of their tokens directly and indirectly. The investors may sell any securities convertible into or exercisable or exchangeable for the investment contract between an investor and the company. The issuance of the tokens is conditional upon the investors’ compliance with the rule. One investor stated for the latest cryptocurrency news:

The future issuance of tokens is conditional upon the investor’s compliance with this rule. If Telegram learns the investor broke the agreement, it can cancel the allocation.

Blockchain News

Blockchain CEOs Tired Of The South Korean Regulation: Report

Published

23 hours ago

August 19, 2019

Stefan

Blockchain CEOs are tired of the South Korean regulations since the blockchain projects are now leaving the market because of the headaches from the regulators according to the coming altcoin news reports we have today here on DC Forecasts. According to some industry experts, the local news outlet Business Korea noted that there is an increasing tendency for Blockchain projects born in South Korea to find easier funding across the world. Major international exchange is now the focus of the Blockchain CEOs looking to raise cash and mainly those with high volume residing in a pro-crypto jurisdiction. The reason lies in south Korea’s problems with the implementation of the controversial cryptocurrency regulations and it says:

‘’Experts point out that domestic blockchain projects are flocking to foreign exchanges largely due to tougher domestic cryptocurrency exchange market conditions. Investors cannot make or withdraw deposits in the Korean currency at Korean exchanges’’

If we don’t include the nation’s four largest exchanges, some of the 200 smaller exchanges cannot even open real-name virtual accounts and this is one of the reasons why crypto investors cannot benefit from the protection systems. The international players such as China’s BW.com, Bitholic and Binance Labs sense the demand from South Korea hence they are either opening Korean won markets or in this case, Binance Labs is only sponsoring the blockchain efforts. Only this week, Japan as one of the governments that openly claim to foster crypto exchange innovation while still has a strict licensing scheme added another platform to its domestic economy in the form of Rakuten Wallet. These moves are also impacting other exchanges and market players' share of the market. As a result the South Korean exchanges are less appealing in 2019 because of the low volume and out of the top one hundred in the world, there are only a few exchanges that are located under the jurisdiction in Seoul. Other issues faced by the local include added responsibility for loss or theft of the customers’ funds. Earlier this month, the commentators warned that the existing restrictions on cryptocurrency by the regulators will throttle attempts to foster blockchain innovation as read in the latest cryptocurrency news:

“It is no exaggeration to say that 97 percent of domestic exchanges are in danger of going bankrupt due to their low volume of transactions’’

Blockchain News

Coinbase Confessed To Have Put Traders’ Funds At Risk

Published

1 day ago

August 19, 2019

Stefan

Coinbase confessed that it had put the funds of the traders at risk and stated that they could have lost funds in the latest blog post as we read in the latest cryptocurrency news today. The largest cryptocurrency exchange revealed that an error in the system has managed to save the customer’s information on Coinbase internal web server logs so when someone had a password that looks like ‘’123456’’ it turned up to look like ‘’123465’’ to the staff of the exchange so they ideally been hashed into non-readable text. According to the exchange, the Bug affected about 3,420 customers:

‘’Under [a very specific] and rare error condition, the registration form on our signup page wouldn’t load correctly, which meant that any attempt to create a new Coinbase account under those conditions would fail. Unfortunately, it also meant that the individual’s name, email address, and proposed password (and state of residence, if in the US) would be sent to our internal logs.’’

The exchange noted that the users who resubmitted the form had their usernames and passwords and other details kept securely. Unfortunately, more than 3,000 customers as mentioned logged their private data onto the servers. Coinbase pretended to be the good Samaritan and fixed the issue on top priority. The company traced the entire line of storage to confirm that they are not holding any more information from the customers’ personal information. According to the blog post:

‘’We have an internal logging system hosted in AWS, as well as a small number of log analysis service providers. Access to all of these systems is tightly restricted and audited. A thorough review of access to these logging systems did not reveal any unauthorized access to this data.’’

The company also started a password reset for affected customers and asserted that a password alone could not have a hacker potentially stealing their bitcoins because they protect each account with mandatory email and 1FA authentications. Coinbase confessed:

‘’We maintain incredibly high standards for securing the Coinbase platform, and any time we fall even slightly short of those standards, we mobilize a team to figure out what went wrong, and how we prevent it from happening again. We also believe in being transparent with our customers, which is why we’re sharing the results of our investigation today.’’

As we can read in the coming altcoin news today, the alert came in a time when the institutional investors are taking huge steps into introducing bitcoin in their portfolio because security is still the top of their concerns.