DeFi | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious Android app on the Google Play Store that enabled the threat actors behind it to steal approximately $70,000 in cryptocurrency from victims over a period of nearly five months. The dodgy app, identified by Check Point, masqueraded as the legitimate WalletConnect open-source protocol to trick unsuspecting users into downloading it. "Fake reviews and consistent branding helped the app achieve over 10,000 downloads by ranking high in search results," the cybersecurity company said in an analysis, adding it's the first time a cryptocurrency drainer has exclusively targeted mobile device users. Over 150 users are estimated to have fallen victim to the scam, although it's believed that not all users who downloaded the app were impacted by the cryptocurrency drainer. The campaign involved distributing a deceptive app that went by several names such as "Mestox Calculator," "WalletConnect - DeFi &

In what's the latest crypto heist to target the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, hackers have stolen digital assets worth around $160 million from crypto trading firm Wintermute . The hack involved a series of unauthorized transactions that transferred USD Coin, Binance USD, Tether USD, Wrapped ETH, and 66 other cryptocurrencies to the  attacker's wallet . The company said that its centralized finance (CeFi) and over-the-counter (OTC) operations have not been impacted by the security incident. It did not disclose when the hack took place. The digital asset market maker, which provides liquidity to more several exchanges and crypto platforms, warned of disruption to its services in the coming days, but stressed that it's "solvent with twice over that amount in equity left." "We are (still) open to treat[ing] this as a white hat, so if you are the attacker – get in touch," the company's founder and CEO, Evgeny Gaevoy,  said  in a tweet. Detai

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

More than $30 million worth of cryptocurrency plundered by the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group from online video game Axie Infinity has been recovered, marking the first time digital assets stolen by the threat actor have been seized. "The seizures represent approximately 10% of the total funds stolen from Axie Infinity (accounting for price differences between time stolen and seized), and demonstrate that it is becoming more difficult for bad actors to successfully cash out their ill-gotten crypto gains," Erin Plante, senior director of investigations at Chainalysis,  said . The development arrives more than five months after the  crypto hack  resulted in the theft of $620 million from the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Ronin Network, with the attackers laundering a majority of the proceeds – amounting to $455 million – through the Ethereum-based cryptocurrency tumbler Tornado Cash. The March 2022 cryptocurrency heist resulted in losses totaling 173,600 ETH wort

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Monday warned of cyber criminals increasingly exploiting flaws in decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms to plunder cryptocurrency. "The FBI has observed cyber criminals exploiting vulnerabilities in the smart contracts governing DeFi platforms to steal investors' cryptocurrency," the agency  said  in a notification. Attackers are said to have used different methods to hack and steal cryptocurrency from DeFi platforms, including initiating flash loans that trigger exploits in the platforms' smart contracts and exploiting signature verification flaws in their token bridge to withdraw all investments. The agency has also observed criminals defrauding the platforms by manipulating cryptocurrency price pairs – assets that can be traded for each other on an exchange – by exploiting a series of vulnerabilities to bypass  slippage checks  and steal roughly $35 million in digital funds. It further said that the threat ac

Microsoft has warned of emerging threats in the  Web3  landscape, including "ice phishing" campaigns, as a surge in adoption of blockchain and DeFi technologies emphasizes the need to build security into the decentralized web while it's still in its early stages. The company's Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team called out various new avenues through which malicious actors may attempt to trick cryptocurrency users into giving up their private cryptographic keys and carry out unauthorized fund transfers. "One aspect that the immutable and public blockchain enables is complete transparency, so an attack can be observed and studied after it occurred," Christian Seifert, principal research manager at Microsoft's Security and Compliance group,  said . "It also allows assessment of the financial impact of attacks, which is challenging in traditional Web2 phishing attacks." The theft of the keys could be carried out in several ways, including im