Block Digest #21 - Your Phone Is Unsafe, #BlueBorne Exploit Revealed - Oh And China Is Still "Banning" Bitcoin

Welcome to episode #21 of Block Digest! (Tuesday, September 12th 2017) Join us: https://bitcoinmumble.com/ Credits ======== Shinobius - https://twitter.com/brian_trollz Chris Ellis - https://twitter.com/MrChrisEllis Janine - https://twitter.com/J9Roem and Rick M. https://twitter.com/cryptorick This video is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Links ===== # DID CHINA BAN BITCOIN OR NOT? http://bitkan.com/news/topic/37397?fr... https://imgur.com/a/f6kVk - translated statement Whale Panda suggest this will just ban trading BTC for CNY https://twitter.com/WhalePanda/status... https://twitter.com/WhalePanda/status... https://twitter.com/WhalePanda/status... # North Korea Hackers Step Up Attacks It is reported that North Korea could be using Bitcoin to evade sanctions - Bloomberg’s Yuji Nakamura & Sam Kim https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl... FireEye Report on N Korea https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-r... What evidence do we have that N Korea is behind the hacks? https://www.csoonline.com/article/318... Links point back to Kaspersky Lab https://www.csoonline.com/article/318... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology... The claim is based on IP Addresses originating in North Korea https://www.theguardian.com/technolog... https://securelist.com/lazarus-under-... This is amid the US banning the russian based Kaspersky software from the military back in July 2017 https://phys.org/news/2017-07-kaspers... # IOTA founder & dev respond to vulnerability report Recap: IOTA blog post from August vulnerability fix: https://blog.iota.org/upgrades-update... “Creating a new cryptographic hash function is no trivial undertaking, even when it is being built on preexisting world class standards. “Don’t roll your own crypto” is a compulsory uttered mantra that serves as a good guiding principle for 99.9% of projects, but there are exceptions to the rule. When spearheading technology for a new paradigm this statement is no longer axiomatic. Progress must march on…” Developer Sergey Ivancheglo responds to report: https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Bey... “I was pretty sure that the protection would last long time because it was hidden inside cryptographical part and programming skills would be insufficient to disarm the mechanism. But nothing lasts forever and finally the copy-protection measure was found by Neha Narula's team.” IOTA founder David Sønstebø responds to report: https://blog.iota.org/curl-disclosure... “On August 8th, the IOTA Team implemented a safety precaution by switching Curl with Keccak-384 (wrapped as “Kerl”, as a tongue-in-cheek homage to what it was replacing), but no user funds were ever at risk prior to the upgrade.” They claim they intentionally introduced a vulnerability into their own code as a “copy-protection measure,” but they are fine with taking someone else’s cryptography work & renaming it for no other reason than sentimentality (!?) # Watch your Bitcoins #BlueBorne Turn off #Bluetooth on all #Android and #Windows devices until the #Blueborne exploit is patched. $crypto wallets potentially vulnerable. https://twitter.com/notsofast/status/... #BlueBorne is a virus that spreads via Bluetooth on operating systems including iOS and Android https://twitter.com/campuscodi/status...