As Bitcoins quickly become a very real form of money – people have already invested life savings in the digital currency that has risen in value from $13/coin in January to $140/coin currently – it has as well become a prime target for backers. Today, it has been proven that the money-transfer medium is very vulnerable through transaction records that are discoverable by search engines, which lead to potential hacking targets. The records indicate what a user bought and how much they paid, as well as their email addresses. For the company that has sold over $1 million of Bitcoin over the past 30 days, this Phishing issue is the most recent, and prominent, of issues with the currency; in 2011 there was a major crash that brought the value of the currency down over 90%, and Mt. Gox, the largest name in Bitcoin trading, was also hacked. So while many have jumped on the Bitcoin bandwagon, this is a reminder to many more potential buyers that the currency is, like most things on the Internet, quite vulnerable.
Tag: Phishing
Twitter Adds Beefed Up E-mail Security
Following a series of high profile security breaches that brought Twitter’s security woes to the fore once again, Twitter has announced that it adopted the DMARC e-mail security protocol earlier this month. The protocol works by comparing e-mails supposedly from a known sender to a record of known information about that sender, and routing the verified messages. Twitter is doing this in hopes of cutting down the number of spoofed e-mails Twitter users receive in attempts to breach accounts, but has still made no comment on more advanced measures like two-step authentication, already in use by Google, Dropbox, and others.
