Bitcoin Flaws Beckon Hackers - Info Security
Info Security, by Tara Seals
Digital currencies are an increasingly important aspect of e-commerce and other transactional arenas. But be aware: Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies based on blockchain technology, have a few flaws that could open them up for abuse by enterprising hackers.
Kaspersky Lab and INTERPOL broke that sobering news at the BlackHat Asia conference in Singapore, where they presented research on how blockchain-based cryptocurrencies could be abused through the pollution of public decentralized databases with arbitrary data.
They also demonstrated a proof-of-concept exploit using the Bitcoin network—a harmless piece of code that did nothing more than open up the Notepad application. Nonetheless, it made its point.
“Blockchainware, short for blockchain-based software, stores some of its executable code in the decentralized databases of cryptocurrency transactions,” Vitaly Kamluk, a Kaspersky researcher, explained in a blog. “It is based on the idea of establishing a connection to the P2P networks of cryptocurrency enthusiasts, fetching information from transaction records and running it as code. Depending on the payload fetched from the network, it can be either benign or malicious.” Read more.
