It might have passed you by, but an essential part of the Internet's infrastructure took a heavy knock last week. The Silk Road—you know, the website where you can buy any drug imaginable—was subjected to a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Calling the Silk Road ...
A Bitcoin transaction services company says that hackers broke into one of its brokerage accounts last week, nabbing more than $12,000 worth of the digital currency. That attack knocked Bitinstant offline over the weekend. The company says that while it lost Bitcoins, no customers wer...
Zach Harvey has an ambitious plan to accelerate adoption of the Internet's favorite alternative currency: installing in thousands of bars, restaurants, and grocery stores ATMs that will let you buy Bitcoins anonymously. It's the opposite of a traditional automated teller that dispense...
Bitcoin has staged a dramatic comeback in the past two months, more than doubling its value against the dollar in that time and trading at record levels. The virtual currency was trading above $32 a share today after languishing in the mid-teens in January. The record was reached on t...
Those using the Ruby on Rails web application framework on their websites are being advised to update the software immediately after multiple new vulnerabilities were found. It's the second time this month that Rails has been patched because of serious flaws. Ruby on Rails is an open-...
In a bid to harden Singapore's cyberdefense, the government has proposed upgrades to its Computer Misuse Act. To signify the change in tack, the Computer Misuse Act will be renamed Cybersecurity Act. The new Section 15A will now cover detection in addition to prevention and countering...
The Bitcoin scheme is a rare example of a large scale global payment system in which all the transactions are publicly accessible (but in an anonymous way). We downloaded the full history of this scheme, and analyzed many statistical properties of its associated transaction graph. In ...
More than three-quarters of the digital coins in the Bitcoin digital currency scheme aren't circulating because they remain dormant in user accounts that have never participated in outgoing transactions, a recently published study has found. The figure translates to more than 7.019 mi...
