Crypto Kidnappers Release Victim After Disappointing Digital Wallet Haul

#CryptoFail #RansomRegret #HeistGoneWrong #DigitalDisappointment #EpicLetdown By: TheJestPress.com In a bewildering turn of events, the notorious hacker collective "Pixel Predators" abruptly released their hostage Tuesday morning after discovering his digital wallet contained a staggering £6.71—roughly enough to buy a coffee and a half in central London, or a full meal if you’re willing to brave…

http://thejestpress.com/2025/07/23/crypto-kidnappers-release-victim-after-disappointing-digital-wallet-haul/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social

Crypto Kidnappers Release Victim After Disappointing Digital Wallet Haul

#CryptoFail #RansomRegret #HeistGoneWrong #DigitalDisappointment #EpicLetdown By: TheJestPress.com In a bewildering turn of events, the notorious hacker collective “Pixel Predators” abr…

THEJESTPRESS.COM
Hey Crypto Fam! 🚨 HUGE Bitcoin blunder! One user accidentally paid $60k in fees. 🤯 RBF can help, but know your fee units! Don't make the same costly mistake! #Bitcoin #CryptoFail #RBF

“Just” a few rogue contractors.
“Just” some sensitive data stolen.
“Just” a $20M ransom.
But don’t worry: no private keys were touched.
↘️
#Coinbase: Fort Knox of Web3… with a revolving door.
#Bitcoin: your ticket to freedom…yes, until you lose your seed phrase and customer support shrugs.
But hey, the YouTube guru called it “inevitable”.

🔗 https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cryptocurrency/crypto-giant-coinbase-falls-prey-to-an-inside-job-expects-up-to-usd400-million-in-losses
#web3 #crypto #bitcoin #blockchain #infosec #techsarcasm #digitalfreedom #cryptofail

Crypto giant Coinbase falls prey to an inside job, expects up to $400 million in losses

Some of its employees and contractors went rogue after they were bribed by hackers to gather information.

Tom's Hardware

#ReverseEngineering of the #SamsungNX social media uploads right from the camera reveals a huge surprise: camera engineers are bad at encryption and #security 🤦🤷

https://op-co.de/blog/posts/samsung_nx_cryptofail/

#CryptoFail #Samsung #camera

Samsung NX 2009 Crypto Fail: Social Media Uploads

#CryptoFail firm #FTX #Bankruptcy proceedings include filing #lawsuit vs #Stanford faculty member family of #incarcerated financial whiz kid #SBF for enriching themselves at trough of his #criminal #Creepto enterprise . #Lawsuit seeks to recover million$ for #victims from #parents who personally benefitted from son's particularly potent #Ponzi #Fraud

https://fortune.com/crypto/2023/09/19/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-joe-barbara-siphoning-millions-personal-benefit/

FTX sues Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents for allegedly ‘siphoning’ millions of dollars for their ‘own personal benefit’

The lawsuit alleges that Bankman and Fried received $1,200 hotel rooms, Bahamas property, and a cameo in a Super Bowl commercial.

Fortune

#Cryptofail can happen for larger organizations, too: #Microsoft #Office365 email message #encryption (#OME) uses AES cipher in Electronic Code Book (#ECB) mode of operation for protecting the OME encrypted messages.

The ECB mode encrypts plaintext blocks independently, without randomization; therefore, the inspection of any two ciphertext blocks reveals whether or not the corresponding plaintext blocks are equal. What this means is that repeating parts of the message get encrypted to identical values revealing structure of the messages. It also will allow creating “fingerprints” of messages, where the relationship of repeating patterns can be used to infer similarity of different messages.

To make matters worse, in addition of keeping the encrypted message in the email server itself, OME by default also sends the encrypted message as an attachment to the recipient. While email typically does best-effort TLS encryption, in practice email transmission cannot really be considered secure. In practice this means that the poorly encrypted messages can be analyzed by anyone who ever managed to intercept the email message or happens to run into any of the OME encrypted messages at a later date. This allows actors who either have large collection of email traffic or who can access the email messages to analyze messages after the fact.

When I approached Microsoft about this flaw, they awarded me $5000 bug #bounty and then proceeded to do nothing. As far as I know the flaw is still present in Office 365 today. I have no clue why Microsoft refuses to fix this flaw, but I presume the reason is that it would break backwards compatibility.

The included sample images and the corresponding “encrypted” version of it were procured by sending an OME protected message with Outlook and then extracting the image from the RPMSG attachment.

#mistakesweremade #epicfail

@icing I bet.

"Not Invented Here" is extremely dangerous with #cryptography. More often than not it leads to some fatal flaw that totally breaks the intended protection. This is also very dangerous as laymen have no way of understanding if the solution is good or not. They will happily accept the #snakeoil since they have no way of verifying the claims.

Another classic #cryptofail I've seen was using a textbook #RSA to secure 4 digit PIN. That obviously was really stupid as it allowed creating a list of 10000 cipher texts matching the corresponding clear text PIN codes.

About a year ago I ran into a #mobile application that claimed to implement a secure message delivery over #SMS. The demonstration video of the application was "interesting": The message was #encrypted and then sent over SMS (notably the message was encrypted first and the recipient was selected only after this). The recipient would then paste the ciphertext to the app on their end to decrypt it. This immediately rang some major alarm bells: They wouldn't just use some fixed encryption key would they?

I wasn't surprised to learn that it was AES in CTR mode with key "12345678901234561234567890123456" and IV "1234567890123456" 🤦​ #cryptofail #mistakesweremade #epicfail

Note to myself: #Encrypted #backups really suck when you forget your passphrase. I do have a #backup though.

#fail #epicfail #cryptofail #security #securityfail #data

Was pleasantly surprised today by https://bugzil.la/524403 being resolved. Only to see it immediately followed up by: "Script error. Ignore." So #Firefox still won't properly protect the database of locally stored passwords, and no plans change this it seems. #cryptofail
524403 - softtoken's master password KDF process should be stronger (currently easily brute forced due to low iteration count)

REOPENED (nobody) in NSS - Libraries. Last updated 2019-05-21.