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Category: blockchains

The development arrives days after Elastic Security Labs disclosed the Lazarus Group’s use of a new macOS malware called KANDYKORN to target blockchain engineers.

Also linked to the threat actor is a macOS malware referred to as RustBucket, an AppleScript-based backdoor that’s designed to retrieve a second-stage payload from an attacker-controlled server.

In these attacks, prospective targets are lured under the pretext of offering them investment advice or a job, only to kick-start the infection chain by means of a decoy document.

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It’s strange times we’re living in when a blockchain billionaire, not the usual Big Tech suspects, is the one supplying the compute capacity needed to develop generative AI.

It was revealed yesterday that Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of blockchain startups Stellar, Ripple and Mt Gox and aerospace company Vast, launched a 501©(3) nonprofit that purchased 24,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs to build data centers that’ll lease capacity to AI projects.

Already, the cluster of GPUs — worth an estimated half a billion dollars and among the largest in the world — is being used by startups Imbue and Character.ai for AI model experimentation, claims Eric Park, the CEO of a newly formed organization, Voltage Park, that’s charged with running and managing the data centers.

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‘Etherhiding’ Blockchain Technique Hides Malicious Code in WordPress Sites: https://informatech.co/3S3tw

A threat actor has been abusing proprietary blockchain technology to hide malicious code in a campaign that uses fake browser updates to spread various malware, including the infostealers RedLine, Amadey, and Lumma.

While abuse of blockchain is typically seen in attacks aimed at stealing cryptocurrency — as the security technology is best known for protecting these transactions — EtherHiding demonstrates how attackers can leverage it for other types of malicious activity.

Researchers from Guardio have been tracking a campaign dubbed ClearFake over the last two months in which users are misled into downloading malicious fake browser updates from at least 30 highjacked WordPress sites.

Continue reading “‘Etherhiding’ Blockchain Technique Hides Malware in WordPress Sites” | >

This post is also available in: he עברית (Hebrew)

Researchers from the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering are developing a first-of-its-kind innovative system against fake news that relies on blockchain. Their goal? A world where people have greater trust in the news they see and hear.

It is already known that disinformation – especially digitally created – poses a great threat to democracy. There is evidence fake news could have influenced important world events like Brexit, the 2016 US elections, the Russia-Ukraine war, etc. Big tech companies like Facebook and Google have been trying to establish policies to prevent the spread of disinformation on their platforms, with limited success.

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Year 2018 face_with_colon_three

Computers are shrinking rapidly. You can build a pretty capable little machine powered by a device like the Raspberry Pi, but that’s still huge compared with IBM’s latest machine. The company that started out selling massive mainframe computers has developed the world’s smallest computer (Opens in a new window). Each one is smaller than a grain of salt, but it packs more computing power than you’d expect.

The micro-computer is a complete system-on-a-chip (SoC) with a processor, memory, storage, and a communication module. The CPU contains several hundred thousand transistors, and IBM says it’s capable of performance on par with an x86 CPU from 1990. That’s not very fast compared with even the slowest modern computers, but it’s impressive for something you can’t see without a magnifying glass. It makes more sense when you look at the impressive developments in other SoC designs. The latest Qualcomm Snapdragon chips are about 1 square centimeter and have more processing power than supercomputers from the early 90s.

The chip is just a prototype right now, but IBM has big plans (Opens in a new window) for this (literally) microscopic computer. It’s touting this as a significant advancement for blockchain technology, but not the same blockchain that’s used to track Bitcoin transactions. A blockchain is merely a distributed ledger that can be used for various purposes. IBM and other companies have been looking for ways to use blockchains without the cryptocurrency attached.

Continue reading “IBM Creates World’s Smallest Computer for Blockchain Technology” | >

Sure, you could just stick a ChatGPT sidebar in your browser. But what do we really want AI to do for us as we use the web? That’s the much harder question.

At some point, if you’re a company doing pretty much anything in the year 2023, you have to have an AI strategy. It’s just business. You can make a ChatGPT plug-in. You can do a sidebar. You can bet your entire trillion-dollar company on AI being the future of how everyone does everything. But you have to do something.

The last one of these was crypto and the blockchain a couple of years ago, and Josh Miller, the CEO of The Browser Company, which makes the popular new Arc browser, says he’s… More.

AI is coming for your online life… but nobody’s exactly sure how it’s going to work.

Continue reading “AI is coming to the Arc browser — but probably not like you think” | >

Telegram, the popular messenger with 800 million monthly active users worldwide, is inching closer to adopting an ecosystem strategy that is reminiscent of WeChat’s super app approach. Certain aspects of the ecosystem will be decentralized with help from two heavyweights: Telegram’s crypto partner TON Foundation and WeChat’s owner Tencent.

Telegram has been working on a platform where third-party developers, from games to restaurants, can build mini apps to interact with users. In Telegram’s own words: “Developers can use JavaScript to create infinitely flexible interfaces that can be launched right inside Telegram — and can completely replace any website.”

To build out this super app platform, Telegram relies on a network of infrastructure partners both from the established tech world and the crypto space. Among them is The Open Network (TON) Foundation, which lays the blockchain groundwork for Telegram but operates as an independent organization.

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For every NFT sold, there are four more that weren’t giving buyers ample choice on what they wanted to pick and at what price.

As many as 95 percent of the non-fungible tokens or NFTs created during the bull run of cryptocurrencies just a couple of years ago are now worthless, according to a new report from a website dappGambl that reviews crypto products.

NFTs were all over the news in 2021–22 when celebrities splurged millions of dollars to buy images features Bored Apes and a digital copy of events such as the completion of the code of the World Wide Web or the first tweet from Jack Dorsey on the platform that has now become X.

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The developer also used OpenAI’s DALL-E to create an image for the token.

ChatGPT just engineered, designed, and marketed a cryptocurrency coin called AstroPepeX. The developer, who goes by the name CroissantEth on X, used the AI chatbot to write a crypto contract to create its own token on the blockchain, gave the name ‘AstroPepeX’ to the token, and even created a ticker – $APX for it.

At first, ChatGPT suggested ‘FluffyUnicorn Coin’ for the crypto name, but CroissantEth didn’t like it, so it gave the chatbot more context about cryptocurrencies.

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North Korea-linked hackers have stolen hundreds of millions of crypto to fund the regime’s nuclear weapons programs, research shows.

So far this year, from January to Aug. 18, North Korea-affiliated hackers stole $200 million worth of crypto — accounting for over 20% of all stolen crypto this year, according to blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs.

“In recent years, there has been a marked rise in the size and scale of cyber attacks against cryptocurrency-related businesses by North Korea. This has coincided with an apparent acceleration in the country’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs,” said TRM Labs in a June discussion with North Korea experts.

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