Bitcoin's Blockchain Offers Safe Haven For Malware And Child Abuse, Warns Interpol - Forbes

Forbes, by Thomas Fox-Brewster

The blockchain, the public ledger of all Bitcoin transactions, has all kinds of good uses outside of providing stability for the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, from decentralised data storage to super-flexible email. But it can also be put to malicious use. According to Interpol’s Christian Karam, speaking from the Black Hat Asiaconference, it could be abused to store malware control mechanisms or provide access to illicit content such as child abuse images that would be extremely difficult to take down.

To prove the point, Kaspersky researcher Vitaly Kamluk, who is currently on secondment at Interpol, created a proof of concept software, which had the potential to become malware, that could take in information from a hacker-controlled Bitcoin address (the unique identifier of owners of cryptocurrency) and a transaction hash (an encrypted representation of a transaction) over a command line. The demo app, as Kamluk calls it, connects to the Bitcoin network, requesting certain blockchain data from a Bitcoin address containing the ostensibly legitimate, but potentially malicious, information on the network. The app then locates the related transaction information from the data, extracting chunks of code stored as recipient Bitcoin wallet identifiers, he told FORBES. These are then pieced together and run. Read more.