The clandestine mining of cryptocurrency is something that we have seen in various forms over the last year or so, in website code and Android apps. A new discovery by security firm Trend Micro shows that hackers have found a way to inject Coinhive mining code into ads that appear on YouTube.

The crypto-jacking technique means that hackers have been able to profit by using other people's CPU time to mine the Monero cryptocurrency while they watch videos. Trend Micro reports that there has been a huge increase in Coinhive web miner detections in recent days, with hackers abusing Google's DoubleClick to distribute the code through big sites including YouTube.

Trend Micro says that over the last week there has been a threefold increase in the JS_COINHIVE.GN Coinhive miner. The company says that "advertisements found on high-traffic sites not only used Coinhive [...] but also a separate web miner that connects to a private pool," and explains that it shared its finding with Google.

Writing about its finding in a blog post, Trend Micro explains:

    We detected an almost 285 percent increase in the number of Coinhive miners on January 24. We started seeing an increase in traffic to five malicious domains on January 18. After closely examining the network traffic, we discovered that the traffic came from DoubleClick advertisements.

    An analysis of the malvertisement-riddled pages revealed two different web miner scripts embedded and a script that displays the advertisement from DoubleClick. The affected webpage will show the legitimate advertisement while the two web miners covertly perform their task. We speculate that the attackers' use of these advertisements on legitimate websites is a ploy to target a larger number of users, in comparison to only that of compromised devices. The traffic involving the abovementioned cryptocurrency miners has since decreased after January 24.

The impact of the crypto-miners was far from insignificant -- they had been configured to use 80 percent of CPU resources for mining purposes. By using an obfuscated private miner, the hackers were also able to bypass Coinhive's commission fee.

Over 3 million Koreans (1/17 of total population) have created KYC bank -> exchange accounts according to the financial authorities and commercial banks. The virtual currency trading real name system will be implemented on January 30th.

Experty's keenly-awaited ICO has dissolved into disarray after a hacker targeted investors and stole roughly $150,000 in Ethereum (ETH) ahead of the event.

Experty's Initial Coin Offering (ICO), also known as a token sale, is designed to raise funds for a "Skype-like voice and video application" which could also take secure payments through the Blockchain.

Experty's ICO is expected to launch at the end of this month. As first reported by Bleeping Computer, an unknown threat actor sent fraudulent pre-ICO messages to Experty users which had signed up for announcements.

These phishing messages, while littered with poor spelling, urged users to invest within 12 hours to receive bonus Experty tokens (EXY) in exchange for their Ethereum.

The phishing email also contained a wallet address which is not associated with the company.

It appears that many fell for the scam, and while the wallet is now empty, a total of 74 transactions have been made in the last few days in ETH worth roughly $150,000.

Experty uses the Bitcoin Suisse service for handling token sales and so any transfers to this wallet are outside of the firm's control. In addition, it is possible that more than one wallet was used during the phishing scheme.

However, this does not mean the company is without fault. According to a statement posted on Medium, the hacker was able to find out the email addresses of Experty users as "one of [the company's] reviewers was compromised and hackers gained access to some information about users."

The information was stolen by compromising a PC belonging to a team member that was involved in conducting an Experty PoC (Proof-of-Care) review.

In a new company statement, Experty has made a gesture to those who fell for the scam by promising to reimburse them for their losses. The company said:

    "We are greatly saddened by the recent email scam that has targeted our community due to [the] recent data breach. We will be contacting the victims that are in our database in order to distribute the proportional amount of EXY tokens to them, including the bonuses for their tier, from our company allocation.

    If someone wishes to receive ETH instead, we ask them to please contact us privately about this."

Any Ethereum sent to the attacker's wallet after the timing of this announcement -- at 21.30 UTC -- will not be refunded, to prevent "people purposely sending money to the scam address to receive EXY tokens," according to Experty.

Dubai-based cryptocurrency exchange BitOasis, which was founded in 2014 by Jordanian entrepreneur Ola Dudin, is to add Ripple to its list of tradable currencies.

Starting from Tuesday, January 30, customers can buy Ripple (XRP) tokens on the platform using wire transfers in AED or credit cards issued by UAE banks.

Currently, the site allows traders to buy and sell BitCoin and Ethereum, the two biggest coins by market cap, but the interest in Ripple has surged along with its price – which increased from just $0.20 to nearly $3.50 in the space of six weeks towards the end of 2017.

Although the price has retreated back to around $1.25, it is still the third largest crypto by market cap.

“We’ve decided to introduce XRP trading to meet the increased demand from our customers to add to the list of major cryptocurrencies and digital assets offered on our platform,” said BitOasis in a statement issued on Sunday, January 28.

How can we manage the passwords/private keys in a secured and neat way. There are Exchanges passwords, ICO's, Altcoin wallets, Bitcoin wallets, Private keys and wallet file, paper wallets and the list just grows and its difficult sometimes to manage the passwords and stuffs for all these.

There are some basic guidelines which could be followed

1. Don't use the same password for all the exchanges. Dont use the same password as your email password to the exchanges.
2. Spend some time on the password you chose and make it unique everytime.
3. Dont take the backup keys as photo in your mobile. Instead write it down on a diary/notebook.
4. Always take a backup of the backupkeys to recover accounts, recover google authenticator, etc
5. Use atleast 1 USB disk exclusively and store as a backup apart from your original storage of keys/passwords.
6. Write down the keys on the paper and put in a locker. This would definitely help.

Apart from that, if there any best practices that can be followed add below and how this can be better done in a more organized way..

I start to wonder how could a high security exchange site be hacked? Aint it an inside job? or maybe they team was behind it and just blame hackers for that certain matter to make the public confusd?. Well we dont know the real story until it is investigated but NEM on other exchange sites i think would drop or will also lock the address. Because where would they sell it if all exchange would canel their NEM account?

The Japan Blockchain Association (JBA) has previously established self-regulation standards which its cryptocurrency exchange members voluntarily adopt. The standards include “the maintenance of cold wallet, etc., under the consent of the related members,” the association announced on Saturday after one of its members, Coincheck, suffered a hack which led to an approximately 58 billion yen loss on its platform.

The association currently has 127 members, 15 of them are crypto exchange members and 35 are blockchain members. Among crypto exchange members are Bitflyer, Coincheck, GMO Coin, and Bitocean. Bitflyer CEO Yuzo Kano is the association’s representative director. According to the JBA’s announcement:

        The fact that the maintenance of the cold wallet was delayed caused the current illegal outflow. It is very regrettable.

Japanese Crypto Exchanges Strengthen Self-Regulation Following Coincheck HackThe association noted that the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA) has alerted the representatives of each cryptocurrency exchange regarding their security. “We are looking for further measures,” the JBA emphasized, adding that its crypto exchange members have been told to “check the status of [their] security based on the possibility of cyber attack.” The association noted:

        In the future, in order to appropriately secure the security of virtual currency exchange traders…we will establish stricter voluntary regulations and seek compliance with members.

It depends on which country you are in. It is a case to case basis. 1 talked to one of the members here in bitcointalk.org and he says that Bitcoin is fine in his Southeast Asian Country but if they found out that you're Bitcoin came from winnings in gambling they will deactivate your soft wallet. They say it is part money laundering.

the "break" was not a major thing, it was a small size rise above the line in the picture and as you can see the price is still the same. if it was a real break out then price should have been higher that this with a faster rise.
it may be a little soon but we are getting there, 2 more days remaining from January and I think next month will be much more exciting than this month. specially with transaction fees going down fast.

I just wanted to know, if there any reliable crypto fund/portfolio managers available in the market.. This is just to know if there any such services available..

Old Mutual Global Investors, the UK-based asset manager, is taking positions in cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, through its Gold and Silver Fund, Bloomberg reports.

The fund, which manages $216m in mostly listed equities, started buying bitcoin in April, with a mandate to allocate up to 5% to cryptocurrencies, manager Ned Naylor-Leyland told Bloomberg on Thursday. The plan was to take profit from bitcoin as the price rose and reinvest it in gold and silver assets.

The bitcoin price exceeded the gold price for the first time in March. While the price of gold is up 8.7% over the past year, bitcoin has shot up 1,000%. This has caused many to label the cryptocurrency a bubble, although pundits point out that less than 1% of the world’s population owns it, suggesting that the price could rise further.

I missed to buy bitcoin when it dipped to $9K. Then I missed it again at $10k thinking it might go down to $9k again. And now, I am waiting for $10k but it seems that it will not go below $11k again. I must be the biggest idiot in crypto world

There are many reasons why so many people use the Coinbase exchange. One of the main factors is that the company supports both credit and debit cards to buy Bitcoin and other supported currencies. Unfortunately, it seems there are some issues with these payment methods. A lot of customers have complained about extra charges when using a payment card on Coinbase. It seems such transactions are now considered “cash advances”, which is not a positive development.

Over the past few weeks, we have seen both Visa and Mastercard crack down on cryptocurrency-related activity. The suspension of debit cards issued by Wavecrest has sent shockwaves throughout the cryptocurrency community. According to Visa, the company has zero intention to facilitate or process cryptocurrency-related transactions. It seems that statement also applies to regular branded payment cards used on specific Bitcoin platforms.

More specifically, there are a lot of customers complaining about extra fees when buying cryptocurrencies on Coinbase. This mainly affects Bitcoin purchases, but it is certainly possible that purchasing altcoins could yield similar results. For some reason, using this exchange may now cost an additional 3% of the purchase price, even though Coinbase itself is not charging this fee. Instead, it seems both Visa and Mastercard have changed the “status” of Coinbase – and potentially other cryptocurrency exchanges – in their system.

According to one comment, it is possible that Coinbase is now considered to be a “cash advance” service. This means the Merchant Category Code of this company has been altered, which is pretty much on par with using a payment card for gambling. There is an additional surcharge of up to 3% for every single transaction, which will be charged to customers directly. It seems this issue has been present for at least 36 hours now, although the exchange has not issued any official comments regarding these complaints.

BREAKING: Coincheck says it will compensate all losses to its NEM holders at a rate of 88.549 JPY ($0.81) per each coin. Says it is using its own capital to reimburse clients. Exact date of reimbursement not yet decided.

It was dealt with very rapidly. Their customers were told they'd be made whole shortly after it happened. The coins were immediately tagged and all exchanges were informed. They basically became dead coins within a few hours.

The hacker was really dim to choose XEM. There aren't many exchanges, volume is low, mixing isn't possible, and it's a tight community.

In effect it stopped being a hack after a few hours and became a coin burning. The hacker's only chance is to hand them back in return for a ransom a la Bter's NXT.

Shinhan Bank Will Support Cryptocurrency Exchanges

Kookmin Bank, the biggest financial institution in South Korea, has decided not to support cryptocurrency exchanges and provide virtual bank accounts to cryptocurrency investors. On South Korean trading platforms, each investor is provided with a virtual bank account with which they can withdraw and deposit Korean won, without having to directly move funds from and to actual bank accounts.

Over the past few weeks, local investors were concerned with the abrupt decision of Kookmin Bank to close down virtual bank accounts launched on South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges. Many traders feared that other banks would follow the decision of Kookmin Bank and simply cut financial links to cryptocurrency exchanges.

Earlier this week, Korbit told its users and traders that by the end of January, the exchange will begin accepting deposits and withdrawals from Shinhan Bank accounts instead of Kookmin Bank accounts. The statement sent by Korbit to its users read:

As previously announced, in order to comply with the identification and anti-money laundering regulations being enforced by the government, the current KRW deposit method will be terminated by the end of January 2018.

”To use the new KRW deposit method, which is slated to be implemented within this month, you must have a Shinhan Bank account registered under your legal name. Please use this time to create a banking account at Shinhan Bank. We will follow up with further instructions on how to input the new KRW withdrawal account information on Korbit.”

Well, I guess that means we are reaching a good stability.  Even when a very big theft larger than MtGox comes, nobody gives a shit and the value of the network goes up 5%.  I'd say the days of big panic are almost over.  Now if we could just figure out what to do about the $1.5 Billion Tether problem.