Trader Issues Warning on Altcoin That’s Up Over 360% Year-to-Date, Updates Outlook on Bitcoin and Pepe

July 8, 2023 The Daily Hodl

Binance to delist privacy tokens in France, Italy, Spain and Poland

May 31, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Binance users in France, Italy, Poland and Spain will no longer be able to buy or sell 12 privacy tokens starting from June 26.

Cryptocurrency is going to become less private in Europe as the major exchange Binance is preparing to delist all privacy tokens in countries like France and Italy.

Starting from June 26, privacy tokens like Monero (XMR) or Zcash (ZEC) will no longer be available for trading for Binance customers in France, Italy, Poland and Spain.

A spokesperson for Binance told Cointelegraph that the new restrictions affect a total of 12 coins. The affected tokens include Decred (DCR), Dash (DASH), Zcash (ZEC), Horizen (ZEN), PIVX (PIVX), Navcoin (NAV), Secret (SCRT), Verge (XVG), Firo (FIRO), BEAM (BEAM), Monero (XMR) and MobileCoin (MOB).

“While we aim to support as many quality projects as possible, we are required to follow local laws and regulations regarding the trading of privacy coins, to ensure we can continue to serve as many users as we can,” a representative of Binance said, adding:

“As part of Binance’s ongoing compliance processes, we have reached out to affected users, to notify them that they will no longer be able to purchase or trade privacy tokens on our platform after June 26th.”

In an email to French customers, Binance said that it was no longer able to offer enhanced anonymity crypto assets, or CAE, in several European countries due to local regulatory requirements.

This article is developing and will be updated.

More than 280 blockchains at risk of ‘zero-day’ exploits, warns security firm

March 14, 2023 Coin Telegraph

blockchain exploit

Dogecoin, Zcash and Litecoin have already patched the “critical” vulnerability, but hundreds of others may not have, risking billions’ worth of crypto.

More than 280 blockchain networks are at risk of “zero-day” exploits that could put at least $25 billion worth of crypto at risk, according to cybersecurity firm Halborn.

In a March 13 blog post, Halborn warned of the vulnerability it dubbed “Rab13s” — adding it has already worked with some blockchains, such as Dogecoin, Litecoin and Zcash, to institute a fix for it.

Halborn discovered massive #ZeroDay impacting Dogecoin and 280+ networks including Litecoin and Zcash, putting over $25 Billion of digital assets at risk!

...
— Halborn (@HalbornSecurity) March 13, 2023

Halborn said it was contracted in March 2022 to conduct a security review of Dogecoin’s codebase and found “several critical and exploitable vulnerabilities.”

It later determined those same vulnerabilities “affected over 280 other networks” that risked billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies.

Halborn outlined three vulnerabilities, the “most critical” of which allows an attacker to “send crafted malicious consensus messages to individual nodes, causing each to shut down.”

3/ The most critical vulnerability discovered is related to peer-to-peer (p2p) communications where attackers can craft consensus messages and send it to individual nodes, taking them offline.

Halborn researchers, led by @safe_buffer, have code-named this vulnerability #Rab13s.
— Halborn (@HalbornSecurity) March 13, 2023

It added these messages over time could expose the blockchain to a 51% attack where an attacker controls the majority of the network’s mining hash rate or staked tokens to make a new version of the blockchain or take it offline.

Other zero-day vulnerabilities it found would allow potential attackers to crash blockchain nodes by sending Remote Procedure Call (RPC) requests — a protocol allowing a program to communicate and request services from another.

7/ Secondly, attackers can execute code through the public interface (RPC) as a normal node user. Since a valid credential is required to carry out the attack, the likelihood of this exploit is lower.
— Halborn (@HalbornSecurity) March 13, 2023

It added the likelihood of RPC-related exploits was lower as it requires valid credentials to undertake the attack.

“Due to codebase differences between the networks not all the vulnerabilities are exploitable on all the networks, but at least one of them may be exploitable on each network,” Halborn warned.

The firm said at this time it’s not releasing further technical details of the exploits due to their severity and added it made a “good faith effort” to contact all affected parties to disclose the potential exploits and provide remediation for the vulnerabilities.

Dogecoin, Zcash and Litecoin have already implemented patches for the discovered vulnerabilities, but hundreds could still be exposed, according to Halborn.