00:14 02.09.2018A Fresh Look at Malware and Mobile Threat Prevention
In traditional fiat money systems, governments simply print more money when they need to. But in bitcoin, money isn’t printed at all – it is discovered. Computers around the world ‘mine’ for coins by competing with each other.
At its most basic, a fork is what happens when a blockchain diverges into two potential paths forward — either with regard to a network’s transaction history or a new rule in deciding what makes a transaction valid.
Bitcoin is built on a blockchain system. This means that transactions using Bitcoin are processed by being placed in blocks and then added to the chain. Each block contains just 1MB of information, which limits the amount of transactions that can be placed on each block.
Samsung’s new ‘upcycling’ initiative has seen the company repurpose outdated technology for novel and creative utilities, including the construction of a bitcoin mining rig from out of old smartphones.
In a camera-ready twist, the demand for ransom actually did come in the form of an analog note. Users were instructed to turn on their printers, which promptly spat out a demand for a “licensing fee” of $189 to be paid …
Petya is a type of ransomware that appeared in early 2016 and returned to a trick first seen in the early 1990s, whereby criminals do not encrypt all the files on your computer but instead they attack a part of the operating system called the Master File Table (MFT).
From the looks of images being posted across social media, the ransomware note is in English and demanding $300 in Bitcoin, similar to the WannaCry ransom.
After finding the reference to this domain in the Trojan’s code, the researcher registered the domain, thus suspending the attack. In the remainder of the day, the domain was addressed tens of thousands of times, which means that tens of thousands of computers were spared.
The attack started on Friday, 12 May 2017, infecting more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries, with the software demanding ransom payments in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in 28 languages.
Bitcoin mining isn’t so much about discovering new bitcoins like a gold miner searches for gold. Bitcoin mining is all about being rewarded for validating the authenticity of pending bitcoin transactions.
