In the first three months of 2014, there were numerous reports of various attacks against bitcoin exchanges and digital wallets. A new report has outlined that there has been a significant surge in the number of attacks against bitcoin wallets.
Late last year, Kaspersky Lab, a multi-national computer security company, had forecasted that there would be substantial growth in the amount of attacks against bitcoin pools, exchanges and wallets and, according to the first-quarter figures of 2014, the predictions were indeed correct.
Among one of the biggest bitcoin-related attacks was the one of Mt. Gox, one of the world’s largest bitcoin exchange platforms. Another one that made the news was the hacking of Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles’s personal blog and Reddit accounts and the hackers had used them to publish the MtGox2014Leak.zip.
The malware file was capable of seeking and stealing Bitcoin wallet files from unsuspecting victims.
The computer security experts said that in order for cybercriminals to boost their earnings they infect the computers of individuals and utilize their resources to garner more virtual currency. An example of one Trojan is Trojan.Win32.Agent.aduro, the 12th-most used source on the Internet in the first quarter.
“As well as new incidents, we saw the continuation of campaigns that had seemingly already ended,” said Alexander Gostev, Chief Security Expert, Global Research and Analysis Team, in a statement.
Over the last several months, a few bitcoin exchanges have had to shut down because of attacks and thefts, such as Flexcoin and Vircurex – several other bitcoin exchanges have experienced DDoS attacks that have led to a loss of digital holdings of bitcoin and other virtual currencies.
It was reported Thursday that a Tokyo District Court has ordered the liquidation to commence at Mt. Gox. The announcement occurred more than a week after a bankruptcy administrator said that it would be very hard to resuscitate the troubled bitcoin exchange.
A document was uploaded to its website and was signed by Nobuaki Kobayashi, bankruptcy administrator and attorney, which noted that he would conduct an investigation into the liabilities of Karpeles as well as his missing assets.
A creditors’ meeting is also scheduled for Jul. 23, 2014.
Other Findings
The Kaspersky Lab report also noted that cybercriminals are producing new tools that are designed to steal people’s money, which was discovered by locating the Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.Waller.a in March.
In order to protect their privacy, individuals are turning to VPN services and Tor-anonymisers. However, it has been warned that Tor allows “dark forces,” anonymous networks that can hide malware activity, money laundering and trading on illegal websites.
Kaspersky Lab also highlighted a few statistics from the first quarter of 2014:
- 33.2 percent of computer users worldwide experienced a web-based attack
- 39 percent of counteract Internet attacks originated in Russia and the United States
- Threats against Android accounted for 99 percent of all mobile malware
- In the first quarter, the number of new malicious programs added were 110,324
At the time of this writing, bitcoin is currently trading at $489.
