Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 30 2018, @06:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-internet-was-broken dept.

Kevin Beaumont reports that, by compromising a router at Equinix in Chicago, attackers were able to forge DNS responses for myetherwallet.com, with users "redirected to a server hosted in Russia, which served the website using a fake certificate." Victims' online wallets were drained of cryptocurrency.

Also at The Verge and Ars Technica which said

Amazon lost control of a small number of its cloud services IP addresses for two hours on [April 24] when hackers exploited a known Internet-protocol weakness that let them to redirect traffic to rogue destinations. By subverting Amazon's domain-resolution service, the attackers masqueraded as cryptocurrency website MyEtherWallet.com and stole about $150,000 in digital coins from unwitting end users. They may have targeted other Amazon customers as well.

Wikipedia on BGP


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday April 30 2018, @08:09AM (2 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Monday April 30 2018, @08:09AM (#673638) Homepage Journal

    The money is on the blockchain. It never goes anywhere else. When you make a transaction that transaction is recorded in a future block.

    Wallets are nothing more than a table of public/private key pairs.

    MyEtherWallet wallets are on the user's machine. If the user's had used a local application to access their wallets there wouldn't have been a hack.

    By using - and trusting - javascript that's downloaded every time they accessed their wallets, their private keys got snarfed by the bad guys.

    It's ill-advised to leave significant money in online wallets. Online wallets should only be used for trading; there's no reason to use online wallets just for peer-to-peer payments. Local wallets - on your own box - work just fine for payments.

    Even better is "cold storage" - put your wallet on an external storage device then make a couple offsite backups.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Insightful=1, Informative=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 30 2018, @12:08PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday April 30 2018, @12:08PM (#673686)

    I'm reminded of something a Haitian professor said in University about "walking down the street with hundred dollar bills taped all over your shirt."

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by tibman on Monday April 30 2018, @05:19PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 30 2018, @05:19PM (#673820)

    Having played with Etherium a bit i wouldn't give anyone crap for not wanting to manage their own wallets/transactions. Right now you are required to download and verify the entire blockchain since the beginning in order to do anything with your wallet. It was something like 40gb of data. Every time you start the wallet app you have to download and verify new blocks. I've had it lockup and die and without any checkpoints you are required to delete the blockchain blob and refetch the entire thing. That could take an entire day to sync.

    --
    SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.