Monday, May 20, 2019

Weekly news review (May 11-17)

Good morning everyone! How's Monday going for you so far?

As usual, let's take a look at last week's news highlights in more detail.

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South Korean electronics giant Samsung is planning to bring cryptocurrency and blockchain features to more phones across its Galaxy range.

Citing a press release from Samsung, Business Korea reported on Tuesday that the firm would make its digital wallet app available even on lower-cost models and will further expand the crypto features to more jurisdictions.

The Samsung Blockchain Wallet is currently only available on Samsung’s recently launched flagship phone range, the Galaxy S10. The S10 additionally comes with blockchain features such as digital signing and decentralized apps (dapps), which the report appears to suggest may also be added across the Galaxy range.

eBay has denied rumors that it is going to start accepting cryptocurrency as a payment method, according to a Bloomberg report on May 14.

Speculation has been mounting since the e-commerce giant took out ads at the Consensus conference in New York City. One of the billboards said:

“Virtual Currency. It’s happening on eBay.”

But Sunayna Tuteja, the company’s head of digital assets, told Bloomberg:

“Currently we’re not. We have what we call paperMoney, which is what our clients can try for trading strategies. It was a simulation. So there was no actual execution.”

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has announced that it is back online after completing a security upgrade prompted by a recent hack.

Kicking off at 03:00 UTC Wednesday, the upgrade meant that all services were suspended during this period, according to a Binance support message. A two-hour extension to the upgrade was announced the next morning as some tasks took “longer than expected.”

Deposits and withdrawals have been offline since the hack, which Binance said saw 7,000 BTC (worth about $41 million at the time) stolen from the exchange’s hot wallet. Exchange customers would not be affected by the losses, Binance said.

Following the breach, CZ said in a blog post that the exchange would make “significant” changes related to its application programming interface (API), two-factor authentication (2FA) and withdrawal validation to reduce the risk of future hacks.

The exchange did not disclose full details regarding these efforts due to security concerns, but did say it’s also improving risk management and know-your-customer procedures to fight phishing, among other measures at the back-end.

Monday, May 13 —  Following a solid to break above the $7,400 mark earlier that day, bitcoin (BTC) has broken $8,000, with all top-20 cryptocurrencies trading in the green.

Apart from bitcoin, bitcoin cash (BCH), binance coin (BNB), IOTA (MIOTA), Tezos (XTZ), and Ontology (ONT) have also reported double-digit gains, from 10% to 17%, according to CoinMarketCap.

In a joint effort by several law enforcement agencies from 6 different countries, officials have dismantled a major global organized cybercrime network behind GozNym banking malware.
GozNym banking malware is responsible for stealing nearly $100 million from over 41,000 victims across the globe, primarily in the United States and Europe, for years.

GozNym was created by combining two known powerful Trojans—Gozi ISFB malware, a banking Trojan that first appeared in 2012 and Nymaim, a Trojan downloader that can also function as ransomware.
The United States has charged ten members of the GozNym criminal network, 5 of which were arrested during several coordinated searches conducted in Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.
However, rest of the five defendants reside in Russia and are on the run, including one who developed the GozNym malware and leased it to other cybercriminals by advertising it on underground, Russian-language, online criminal forums.

What are your thoughts on the above? Let us know in the comments section below!


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