sloth unleashed

(via Major glitch in Bitcoin network sparks sell-off; price temporarily falls 23% | Ars Technica)

A technical glitch in the core Bitcoin software forced developers to call for a temporary halt to Bitcoin transactions, sparking a sharp sell-off. The currency’s value briefly fell 23 percent to $37 before regaining much of its value later in the evening.

The core of the Bitcoin network is a shared transaction register known as the blockchain. Approximately every 10 minutes, a new block is created containing a record of all Bitcoin transactions that occurred since the previous block. Nodes in the network, known as miners, race to “discover” this next block by solving a cryptographic puzzle. The winner of this race announces the new block to the other nodes. The other nodes verify that it complies with all the rules of the Bitcoin protocol and then accepts it as the next official entry in the block chain, starting the race anew.

It’s essential for all miners to enforce exactly the same rules about what counts as a valid block. If a client announces a block that half the network accepts and the other half rejects, the result could be a fork in the network. Different nodes could disagree about which transactions have occurred, potentially producing chaos.

That’s what happened on Monday evening. A block was produced that the latest version of the Bitcoin software, version 0.8, recognized as valid but that nodes still running version 0.7 or earlier rejected…

fascinated by this - seems both very clever and very dangerous…

(via Iran-targeting Flame malware used huge network to steal blueprints | Ars Technica)

Attackers behind the Flame espionage malware that targeted computers in Iran used more than 80 different domain names to siphon computer-generated designs, PDF files, and e-mail from its victims, according to a new analysis from researchers who helped discover the threat.

The unknown authors of Flame shut down the sprawling command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure immediately after last Monday’s disclosure that the highly sophisticated malware had remained undetected for at least two years on computers belonging to government-run organizations, private companies, and others. The 80 separate domain names were registered using a huge roster of fake identities, and some of the addresses were secured more than four years ago.

“The Flame C&C domains were registered with an impressive list of fake identities and with a variety of registrars, going back as far as 2008,” Kaspersky Lab expert Alexander Gostev wrote in a blog post published Monday. “In general, each fake identity registered only 2-3 domains, but there are some rare cases when a fake identity registered up to 4 domains…”