BitCoin

By: Patti Conner

Investors were left millions of dollars out of pocket when Mt. Gox died, but was the exchange's hoard of virtual currency long gone before the abrupt closure?

According to a new analysis and results of an investigation conducted by WizSec, Mt. Gox's stolen bitcoin reserves -- worth over $300 million at the time's trading rates -- were taken from the virtual currency exchange's hot wallet systematically over time. However, the theft did not take place in 2014; rather, WizSec lead investigator Kim Nilsson alleges that the funds were taken from late 2011 onwards.

A suburban Chicago police department paid a hacker a $500 ransom to restore access to data on a police computer that the hacker had disabled through the use of an increasingly popular type of virus.

The police department in Midlothian, a village southwest of Chicago, was hit in January by a form of the Cryptoware virus, which encrypted some files on a department computer, leaving them inaccessible without the encryption key, the Chicago Tribune reported (http://trib.in/17k9Hkv ).

Bitcoin prices have been taking a beating since the new year, but today the bottom fell out of the market altogether. After debuting at $314.59 on Friday, January 2, the currency fell to $267 by Monday, Jan 12. Then, in the past 36 hours, prices fell completely off a cliff, with the currency currently priced at $178.67 at CoinDesk.

Australia's national criminal intelligence agency is tracking the use of virtual currencies such as Bitcoin on online black markets as part of its new 'Project Longstrike' operation.

The Australian Crime Commission's executive director of strategy and specialist capability, Judy Lind, today revealed the agency is now monitoring Bitcoin-enabled crime after spending the last two years building technologies capable of tracing Bitcoin transactions.

A Texas man was arrested Thursday and charged with fostering a bitcoin-related Ponzi scheme, in what is the first securities fraud case involving the crypto currency ever lodged by US prosecutors.

Prosecutors said the defendant, Trendon Shavers, is accused [PDF] of promising investors "absurdly high interest" in exchange for turning over their bitcoin to him. Investors were falsely promised that their bitcoin was recoverable at any time, the authorities said.

One of the biggest fears of Bitcoin users is that one day they will wake up and find their virtual currency wallet emptied, signaling that someone, somehow, has managed to uncover the user’s private key. A Bitcoin private key is a secret number that acts as a kind of identifying “ticket,” allowing coins from the corresponding wallet to be spent.

The engineer behind the Heartbleed checker has created a tool to hunt down wallets from poorly secured transactions that leak private keys.

Filippo Valsorda released the Blockchainer tool to Github following a presentation at the Hack in the Box conference in Malaysia today.

A bitcoin-related company that allegedly engaged in deceptive marketing of specialized computers designed to produce the cryptocurrency has been shut down at the request of the US Federal Trade Commission.

In a complaint filed earlier this month against Butterfly Labs, the FTC alleged that the Missouri-based company charged consumers thousands of dollars for computers that mine Bitcoins but then failed to deliver the machines "until they were practically useless, or in many cases, did not provide the computers at all," the agency said in a statement Tuesday.

Someone has taken over the email account belonging to Bitcoin’s secretive creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, and says he will sell his secrets for money.