Bitcoin and blockchain technologies are sparking innovation in financial technology (FinTech), but they do have a dark side. Criminals can use bitcoin for illegal activities and attempt to hide their ill-gotten gains, hoping law enforcement will not track the funds…
Treasury working closely with the IRS for examination Some surprising facts regarding the state of the cryptocurrency environment recently came from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Speaking in August 2018 at the Chicago-Kent Block (Legal) Tech…
CipherTrace Integration into Maltego Significantly Expands Bitcoin Forensics Capabilities Maltego is a popular security research and forensics tool produced by Paterva. Investigators use it as a powerful data mining tool because it allows them to create directed graphs that combine…
CIPHERTRACE GLOBAL ALERT: Spike in Extortion Scams Demanding Bitcoin Payment Global Alert, August 3, 2018: Online extortion attempts have increased dramatically through July 2018. One flavor, in particular, is not new; it is an adaptation of previous phishing attacks used…
Recently released research by CipherTrace has been making the news partly because of some surprising stats. For instance, The Cryptocurrency Anti-Money Laundering Report 2018 Q2 reveals that theft of cryptocurrencies from exchanges skyrocketed in the first half of this year to…
New Presidential Task Force Aims to Fight Cryptocurrency Fraud With the lure of big returns attracting investors—and scammers—to cryptocurrencies, the White House has taken action to protect consumers. President Trump recently signed an executive order creating a new task force…
CipherTrace CEO Leads SINET Panel that Includes New SEC ‘Crypto Czar’ On June 7, 2018, at the SINET Innovation Summit in New York, CipherTrace CEO Dave Jevans sat down with crypto asset experts and thought leaders for a discussion of…
Coinbase’s Response To New York AG’s Request Reveals Shocking Cost of Compliance In April, New York Attorney General’s office announced that it’s looking into thirteen major exchanges, including Coinbase, Gemini Trust, and Bitfinex. Cryptocurrency exchanges have notoriously been subject to…
REINING IN THE WILD EAST Almost five years ago, an event in Japan rocked people’s trust in Bitcoin. Customers of Mt. Gox lost 650,000 bitcoins (worth about $437 million at the time, or $8.5 billion at today’s price), which ultimately…
Ledger hardware wallets have been thoroughly compromised by a 15-year-old researcher, Rashid Saleem, using very small amounts of code. Rashid is the same researcher that exploited the Trezor wallet flaw in August 2017. He was able to install a backdoor…