Tag Archives: cryptocurrency

This Cryptocurrency Could Save The World

The prospect of shifting gears from simply making money to being paid for performing scientific research with your computer is more than just enticing for most tech enthusiasts — and the idea is catching on fast

When most people first get interested in cryptocurrency, it’s for practical reasons — they’re looking for more control over their financial transactions, they’re intrigued by the idea of digital currency, they’re impressed by the price action of the trading markets — and these reasons all have one thing in common: people want to make money.

At a base level, the initial appeal of cryptocurrency is mining. Mining cryptos is like mining for gold with your computer — you research the asset to find the most profitable, you purchase tools for the mining itself, and you pay a fee towards the cost of workers (in this case, the power company), all in the hopes of making enough in return to claim a profit. The problem people immediately face, however, is how difficult it is to make a profit when the cost of equipment and electricity is so high. To make matters worse, all of that computational power is only going to one place: your pocket.

But what if you could donate your processing power while also making a profit in return? And what if that processing power were given to solving some of the most complex problems in the scientific community, problems that if solved could bring humanity to the next level such as mapping the Milky Way Galaxy, curing cancer, or finding life on other planets? Well, there’s a cryptocurrency for that, and it’s called Gridcoin.

Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency that rewards its users for contributing to scientific research through a software program called BOINC, or Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, which was developed by the University of California, Berkeley to help the SETI project, or search for extraterrestrial intelligence. While it isn’t worth much at the moment (about 15 cents per coin), the price has indeed increased over the past two years, making it a contender against other low-priced cryptocurrencies that have been around longer. What’s more is that Gridcoin’s price, along with many other major cryptos, has increased due to Bitcoin’s increase in price, and is now beginning a life of its own much like Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin Cash and other alternative currencies have in the past few years.

Current projections for Gridcoin are pointing towards an average of about 25 cents for coin for the beginning of 2018, and upwards of $2 – $3 by the end of the year. That means that buying Gridcoin now may even be more profitable than mining for the moment. You can purchase Gridcoin on a number of exchanges, including Poloniex and Bittrex, among others.

However, if you are interested in turning your unused processing power into a contributor to the BOINC network and earn your Gridcoin, you can get started by following the instructions on the Gridcoin website.

Police around the world learn to fight global-scale cybercrime

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Frank J. Cilluffo, George Washington University; Alec Nadeau, George Washington University, and Rob Wainwright, University of Exeter

From 2009 to 2016, a cybercrime network called Avalanche grew into one of the world’s most sophisticated criminal syndicates. It resembled an international conglomerate, staffed by corporate executives, advertising salespeople and customer service representatives.

Its business, though, was not standard international trade. Avalanche provided a hacker’s delight of a one-stop shop for all kinds of cybercrime to criminals without their own technical expertise but with the motivation and ingenuity to perpetrate a scam. At the height of its activity, the Avalanche group had hijacked hundreds of thousands of computer systems in homes and businesses around the world, using them to send more than a million criminally motivated emails per week.

Our study of Avalanche, and of the groundbreaking law enforcement effort that ultimately took it down in December 2016, gives us a look at how the cybercriminal underground will operate in the future, and how police around the world must cooperate to fight back.

Cybercrime at scale

Successful cybercriminal enterprises need strong and reliable technology, but what increasingly separates the big players from the smaller nuisances is business acumen. Underground markets, forums and message systems, often hosted on the deep web, have created a service-based economy of cybercrime.

Just as regular businesses can hire online services – buying Google products to handle their email, spreadsheets and document sharing, and hosting websites on Amazon with payments handled by PayPal – cybercriminals can do the same. Sometimes these criminals use legitimate service platforms like PayPal in addition to others specifically designed for illicit marketplaces.

And just as the legal cloud-computing giants aim to efficiently offer products of broad use to a wide customer base, criminal computing services do the same. They pursue technological capabilities that a wide range of customers want to use more easily. Today, with an internet connection and some currency (bitcoin preferred), almost anyone can buy and sell narcotics online, purchase hacking services or rent botnets to cripple competitors and spread money-making malware.

The Avalanche network excelled at this, selling technically advanced products to its customers while using sophisticated techniques to evade detection and identification as the source by law enforcement. Avalanche offered, in business terms, “cybercrime as a service,” supporting a broad digital underground economy. By leaving to others the design and execution of innovative ways to use them, Avalanche and its criminal customers efficiently split the work of planning, executing and developing the technology for advanced cybercrime scams.

With Avalanche, renters – or the network’s operators themselves – could communicate with, and take control of, some or all of the hijacked computers to conduct a wide range of cyberattacks. The criminals could then, for example, knock websites offline for hours or longer. That in turn could let them extract ransom payments, disrupt online transactions to hurt a business’ bottom line or distract victims while accomplices employed stealthier methods to steal customer data or financial information. The Avalanche group also sold access to 20 unique types of malicious software. Criminal operations facilitated by Avalanche cost businesses, governments and individuals around the world hundreds of millions of dollars.

Low risk, high reward

To date, cybercrime has offered high profits – like the US$1 billion annual ransomware market – with low risk. Cybercriminals often use technical means to obscure their identities and locations, making it challenging for law enforcement to effectively pursue them.

That makes cybercrime very attractive to traditional criminals. With a lower technological bar, huge amounts of money, manpower and real-world connections have come flooding into the cybercrime ecosystem. For instance, in 2014, cybercriminals hacked into major financial firms to get information about specific companies’ stocks and to steal investors’ personal information. They first bought stock in certain companies, then sent false email advertisements to specific investors, with the goal of artificially inflating those companies’ stock prices. It worked: Stock prices went up, and the criminals sold their holdings, raking in profits they could use for their next scam.

In addition, the internet allows criminal operations to function across geographic boundaries and legal jurisdictions in ways that are simply impractical in the physical world. Criminals in the real world must be at a crime’s actual site and may leave physical evidence behind – like fingerprints on a bank vault or records of traveling to and from the place the crime occurred. In cyberspace, a criminal in Belarus can hack into a vulnerable server in Hungary to remotely direct distributed operations against victims in South America without ever setting foot below the Equator.

A path forward

All these factors present significant challenges for police, who must also contend with limited budgets and manpower with which to conduct complex investigations, the technical challenges of following sophisticated hackers through the internet and the need to work with officials in other countries.

The multinational cooperation involved in successfully taking down the Avalanche network can be a model for future efforts in fighting digital crime. Coordinated by Europol, the European Union’s police agency, the plan takes inspiration from the sharing economy.

Uber owns very few cars and Airbnb has no property; they help connect drivers and homeowners with customers who need transportation or lodging. Similarly, while Europol has no direct policing powers or unique intelligence, it can connect law enforcement agencies across the continent. This “uberization” of law enforcement was crucial to synchronizing the coordinated action that seized, blocked and redirected traffic for more than 800,000 domains across 30 countries.

Through those partnerships, various national police agencies were able to collect pieces of information from their own jurisdictions and send it, through Europol, to German authorities, who took the lead on the investigation. Analyzing all of that collected data revealed the identity of the suspects and untangled its complex network of servers and software. The nonprofit Shadowserver Foundation and others assisted with the actual takedown of the server infrastructure, while anti-virus companies helped victims clean up their computers.

Using the network against the criminals

Police are increasingly learning – often from private sector experts – how to detect and stop criminals’ online activities. Avalanche’s complex technological setup lent itself to a technique called “sinkholing,” in which malicious internet traffic is sent into the electronic equivalent of a bottomless pit. When a hijacked computer tried to contact its controller, the police-run sinkhole captured that message and prevented it from reaching the actual central controller. Without control, the infected computer couldn’t do anything nefarious.

However, interrupting the technological systems isn’t enough, unless police are able to stop the criminals too. Three times since 2010, police tried to take down the Kelihos botnet. But each time the person behind it escaped and was able to resume criminal activities using more resilient infrastructure. In early April, however, the FBI was able to arrest Peter Levashov, allegedly its longtime operator, while on a family vacation in Spain.

The effort to take down Avalanche also resulted in the arrests of five people who allegedly ran the organization. Their removal from action likely led to a temporary disruption in the broader global cybercrime environment. It forced the criminals who were Avalanche’s customers to stop and regroup, and may offer police additional intelligence, depending on what investigators can convince the people arrested to reveal.

The Avalanche network was just the beginning of the challenges law enforcement will face when it comes to combating international cybercrime. To keep their enterprises alive, the criminals will share their experiences and learn from the past. Police agencies around the world must do the same to keep up.

Frank J. Cilluffo, Director, Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, George Washington University; Alec Nadeau, Presidential Administrative Fellow, Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, George Washington University, and Rob Wainwright, Director of Europol; Honorary Fellow, Strategy and Security Institute, University of Exeter

The blockchain could help advertisers lock up our attention

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Eric T.K. Lim, UNSW and Chee-Wee Tan, Copenhagen Business School

The tech revolution is coming to advertising. Chatbots are replacing humans, big data threatens our privacy, and the blockchain is linking it all together. In our series on tech and advertising, we’re taking a look at how the industry is being reshaped.

While technology has been making more devices “smart”, and we carry phones with all sorts of sensors, these haven’t yet been systematically applied to advertising’s central problem – engagement. The blockchain, however, will make advertising much smarter.

Traditional advertising – think of posters on bus stops and TV commercials – is easy to ignore and its effectiveness is hard to measure. Even online advertising has problems measuring engagement. But with the blockchain, advertisers will be able to tap into the data in our devices, automatically pull together multiple sources of information, and even offer rewards to consumers.

What is the blockchain again?

Think of the blockchain as a kind of a public spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is stored simultaneously on a bunch of different computers and is encrypted.

When someone transfers a Bitcoin (or anything else you’re trading on the blockchain) the transaction is verified by all of the computers, encrypted and added to the spreadsheet, where everyone can see. The encryption and transparency are what make the system secure.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, such as Ripple XRP and Ether, sit on top of the blockchain. They can be used as currencies, transferred between people just like normal money. Or they can be used as a kind of token, the transfer recorded to signify when something has been exchanged.

A computer program known as a smart contract has evolved out of this system. It can execute specific actions when predefined conditions within the blockchain are fulfilled – such as automatically paying a farmer when crops are delivered. But smart contracts could also have huge implications for advertising.

Advertising is going to be more complex

Advertising in the age of blockchains and smart contracts will be something more like an ecosystem. Information and value will flow and be captured in numerous directions. Using smart contracts, many different entities and data streams will be brought together.

Let’s imagine Jane sees an advertisement for a pair of shoes on her smartphone. The advertiser asks that, in exchange for Bitcoin, she reveal her identity by turning on her camera and taking a selfie. She must also allow the advertiser to access her SIM and verify with the phone company that it is indeed Jane who owns the phone. The advertiser would also like to know where Jane is located using the Google Maps application on her phone.

Individually, none of these actions are new. What will be new is having a smart contract to tie it all together.

At the initiation of this advertising effort, the parties involved in the smart contract are Jane, the advertiser, the phone company and Google. A predefined reward (in the form of Bitcoin) promised by the advertiser will be released to Jane only once all parties fulfil their part of the contract. Jane must take a selfie and send it to the advertiser, the phone company must confirm with the advertiser that Jane indeed owns the phone used to take the selfie and Google must release Jane’s location to the advertiser.

There are a few implications from this example.

Consumers like Jane will now be empowered to choose whether they want to give up their privacy in exchange for something. Jane could choose to block Google Maps from revealing her location, for example.

Advertisers will know exactly how consumers interact with their ads. By specifying actions for Jane to perform, like taking a selfie after watching an ad, advertisers will overcome the crucial problem of not being able to verify whether people are actually paying attention.

They will also know whether consumers have adhered to every part of the agreement. If Jane does not allow Google Maps to reveal her location, the advertiser will be aware of this and may release only some of her reward. This is an efficient and cost-effective method of piecing together the profiles of customers.

Finally, the blockchain will enable advertisers to capture value they could not previously, because they could not track or measure interaction with ads.

For example, let’s say the advertiser’s request is more ambitious, and Jane decides to reveal she is using a cab from company X and dropping by cafe Y to pick up a latte before going to the shoe store. The original advertisement has now generated value not only for the advertiser but also for those other entities.

Using the blockchain means all parties will have access to information about what happened. The advertiser could collaborate with other companies like cab company X and cafe Y to boost business. They could even demand those companies chip in to cover the costs.

A few years off

At this point we must go through a reality check.

While some parts of this picture are already being experimented with – Nasdaq has built a marketplace to buy and sell advertising on a blockchain, and others are building the tokens to sit on top – technologically and politically we are still sorely lacking.

There are also many digital blind spots that, like missing links among security cameras, allow some actions to go unobserved and unaccounted for during the advertising process.

But it is possible that in the future, once the infrastructure and our societies have caught up, every digital device will be connected to a blockchain-like system so that all digital actions are accounted for. When that happens, advertisers won’t know what hit them.

Eric T.K. Lim, Senior Lecturer in Information Systems, UNSW and Chee-Wee Tan, Professor in IT Management, Copenhagen Business School