The Baltimore city government is recovering from a devastating ransomware attack that has locked up its systems, but officials in the city faced a new problem today. As first reported by The Baltimore Sun, Google blocked city departments from using Gmail accounts created as a workaround. The Verge reports: On May 7th, a ransomware attack froze government systems, including email, and demanded the city hand over bitcoin to reverse the hack. Weeks later, the city is still recovering from the attack, which has also shut down systems for paying water bills and some other services. While officials deal with the problem, which could still take months to fix, some have reportedly signed up for free Gmail accounts to keep operating.

Gmail distinguishes between individual users and users in businesses and other organizations, requiring the latter to pay for the service. According to the Sun, which cited the mayor's office, Google's systems deemed the city officials to be part of an organization, and shut down the temporary accounts. Emails to the city health department, city council aides, and the mayor's office bounced on Thursday, according to the report from the Sun. UPDATE: Google has since fixed the problem. "We have restored access to the Gmail accounts for the Baltimore city officials," the spokesperson said. "Our automated security systems disabled the accounts due to the bulk creation of multiple consumer Gmail accounts from the same network."

On May 7, hackers infected about 10,000 of Baltimore city government's computers with an aggressive form of ransomware called RobbinHood, and insisted the city pay 13 bitcoin (then $76,280, today $102,310) to cut the computers loose. The hackers claimed the price would go up every day after four days, and after the tenth day, the affected files would be lost forever. From a report: "We won't talk more, all we know is MONEY!" the ransom note read. "Hurry up! Tik Tak, Tik Tak, Tik Tak!" But the city has not paid. In the two weeks since, Baltimore citizens have not had access to many city services. The city payment services and email systems are still offline. A May 7 Baltimore Sun report stated the Robbinhood ransomware used in this attack encrypts files with a "file-locking" virus so the hackers can hold the files hostage. Among the departments that have had issues with their email and phone systems are the Department of Public Works, the Department of Transportation, and the Baltimore Police Department.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Health Department's epidemiologists aren't able to use the network that allows them to alert citizens of certain which types of drugs are causing recent overdoses. Many services have resumed through phone, and vital emergency systems like 911 and 311 reportedly continued to function. The ransomware froze the system the city uses for executing home sales, which reportedly hurt the local market, but the city began implementing a manual workaround earlier this week.

A week ago bitcoin was trading at $6,000. Today Forbes reports bitcoin "which has been swinging wildly throughout this week, has suddenly rallied back to over $8,000 per bitcoin, somewhat putting to rest investor and trader fears the recent bitcoin bull run may have already ended": The bitcoin price has risen around 50% over the last 30 days, pulling many other major cryptocurrencies with it, including ethereum, Ripple's XRP, bitcoin cash, litecoin, EOS and binance coin... The total bitcoin and cryptocurrency market capitalization, which lost some $30 billion in a matter of minutes on Friday morning, has now recovered almost all of that value and is back around $250 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap which tracks most major cryptocurrencies...

The bitcoin and cryptocurrency sector has been celebrating a raft of positive news all this week, from retail adoption [at Starbucks, Nordstrom And Whole Foods] to legendary investor support. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technical data is also showing the bitcoin price could be heading higher, with well-known bitcoin trader Eric Choe saying he expects the digital token to reach $22,600 sometime in 2020, which would be a fresh bitcoin all-time.
Mark Mobius, the investor cofounder of Mobius Capital Partners who once branded bitcoin a "real fraud", now says instead that in the future bitcoin will be "alive and well."

Just 376 people hold a third of all Ether, the cryptocurrency that powers the Ethereum blockchain, according to new research by Chainalysis. From a report: Large holders are known in the crypto market as "whales," which Chainalysis defines as individuals who hold their assets in digital wallets and not on an exchange, Kim Grauer, a senior economist at the company, said in an interview. By comparison, 448 people own 20 percent of all Bitcoin, she said. Chainalysis also looked at the effect Ether whales have on price, and found that large holders don't move their cryptocurrency often. "The majority of whales aren't traders," she said. "They're mostly holding."

Microsoft is launching the first decentralized infrastructure implementation by a major tech company that is built directly on the bitcoin blockchain. From a report: The open source project, called Ion, deals with the underlying mechanics of how networks talk to each other. For example, if you log onto Airbnb using Facebook, a protocol deals with the software that sends the personal information from your social profile to that external service provider. In this case, Ion handles the decentralized identifiers, which control the ability to prove you own the keys to this data.

Christopher Allen, a crypto veteran and the co-founder of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) working group for decentralized identity (DID) solutions, told CoinDesk that Microsoft's move could impact the entire tech industry. "A lot of enterprise infrastructures use Microsoft products," Allen said. "So if they integrate this into any of their infrastructure products, they'll have access to DID." Indeed, Yorke Rhodes, a program manager on Microsoft's blockchain engineering team, told CoinDesk that Microsoft's team has been working for a year on a key signing and validation software that relies on public networks, like bitcoin or ethereum, yet can handle far greater throughput than the underlying blockchain itself.

An American bitcoin trader and his girlfriend became the first couple to actually live on a "seastead" -- a 20-meter octagon floating in international waters a full 12 nautical miles from Thailand.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this article from the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education describing what happened next: [W]hile they got to experience true sovereignty for a handful of weeks, their experiment was cut short after the Thai government declared that their seastead was a threat to its national sovereignty... Asserting that [their seastead] "Exly" was still within Thailand's 200-mile exclusive economic zone, the government made plans to charge the couple with threatening Thailand's national sovereignty, a crime punishable by death. However, before the Thai Navy could come detain the couple, they were tipped off and managed to escape. They are now on the run, fleeing for their lives.
Venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has donated over $1 million to the Seasteading Institute -- though news about this first experiment must be discouraging. "We lived on a floating house boat for a few weeks and now Thailand wants us killed," one of the seasteaders posted on his Facebook feed.

Last week the Arizona Republic reported that since the Thai government dismantled his ocean home, he's been "on the run" for over two weeks.

The price of Bitcoin "is surging again," now up to more than $6000, writes Inc. columnist Eric Mack: In its decade-long history, the value of the pioneering cryptocurrency has actually followed a pretty reliable trajectory. That is to say, over the full term Bitcoin's value has only grown, much like many stocks, real estate and precious metals. It has seen dramatic run-ups in price followed by painful crashes, but it has consistently retained a significant portion of its previous gains each time it plummets. In other words, Bitcoin has reliably taken two steps forward and only one step back when it tanks. While the crypto captain lost roughly 75 percent of its value after peaking at a price of almost $20,000 per digital coin at the end of 2017, its lowest price from the last twelve months was still double where it stood in May of 2017.

Now, that price point is up again by 75 percent from its bottom in January, leading many to wonder if another great run-up in price could already be underway. If that turns out to be the case, and Bitcoin follows its historic pattern of increasing in price by an order of magnitude, we could be looking at $100,000 per Bitcoin....

A few other factors support the idea that this latest Bitcoin recovery should be taken seriously. As CNBC reports, institutional investors have taken an increasing interest in cryptocurrencies... Of course, there's still plenty of naysayers, headlined by Warren Buffet, who continue to maintain that crypto is nothing more than the latest bubble. But if that's the case, how many times will it burst and refuse to die only to come back stronger? While $6,000 is well below the 2017 high price, it's worth noting that the first time Bitcoin crossed the $6,000 point was in October, 2017.That was only two months before tripling in price to reach its peak. So when cryptos get up a head of steam, they tend to trigger all sorts of FOMO and go "parabolic."
A disclaimer at the bottom of the article notes that its author owns "a small amount of Bitcoin and a few other cryptocurrencies."

"Can't wait to see what the next few months hold for Bitcoin," his article concludes, "and the slew of cryptos that tend to follow its price chart."

In what is being called "the single most significant law enforcement disruption of the darknet to date" by U.S. Attorney Scott Brady, the Justice Department has shut down a major directory of dark web drug marketplaces and arrested the alleged owners. NBC News reports: DeepDotWeb was a regular searchable website that provided a directory with direct access to a host of darknet marketplaces selling illegal narcotics including fentanyl, cocaine, heroin and meth. The website also provided access to marketplaces for firearms, including assault rifles, and for malicious software and hacking tools. The alleged owners, Tal Prihar, 37, and Michael Phan, 34, both from Israel, were arrested Monday, Prihar in France and Phan in Israel, where they remain in custody. They each face a single count of money laundering conspiracy in the U.S. Phan also faces charges in Israel.

Prihar and Phan allegedly received kickback payments through bitcoin when someone purchased an item on the darknet sites found through the directory, earning more than $15 million in fees since October 2013, according to prosecutors. These "referral bonuses" allegedly came from darknet marketplaces including AlphaBay Market, Agora Market, Abraxas Market, Dream Market, Valhalla Market, Hansa Market, TradeRoute Market, Dr. D's, Wall Street Market and Tochka Market. The closing of a directory like DeepDotWeb is significant, Brady said, because it should stifle hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal purchases.

Hackers have stolen over $40 million worth of bitcoin from Binance, world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, the company said on Tuesday. From a report: In a statement, the company said hackers stole API keys, two-factor codes and other information in the attack. Binance traced the cryptocurrency theft -- more than 7,000 bitcoins at the time of writing -- to a single wallet after the hackers stole the contents of the company's bitcoin hot wallet. Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, said the theft impacted about 2 percent of its total bitcoin holdings.

"American Homes For Rent is a publicly traded company that owns more than 50,000 properties," writes Slashdot reader McGruber -- calling our attention to a glaring security error. "Its website has a tab on its listings that says 'Let Yourself In.' If you click it, you are taken to Rently.com, a website that sells the lockbox codes to anyone for only $0.99." And those lockboxes contain a key to the vacant home being advertised.

But what's to stop a scammer from pretending that they're the home-owner, and then sending you the code for that same lockbox so you can tour "their" home -- before they then ask you to wire a deposit?

Ciarra McConnell was one of the scam's "several" unsuspecting victims, reports CBS46 in Atlanta: "The lockbox is what made it seem legitimate, and he gave me the key," said Ciarra. Once she got the key, the scammer emailed a phony lease. Ciarra then wired a $1,900 deposit and moved in. The next morning an American Homes For Rent employee was at her door. "They were just like yup, nope sorry we can't do anything for you but you need to get out," she explained.
The scammers post duplicates of real home listings on Craigslist -- and then ask to be paid through a bitcoin ATM.

If Facebook's pivot from town square to private living room wasn't laden with enough irony, here's a new twist: Big business, it appears, has been invited to join us by the fireplace. From a report: On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported new potential details about Facebook's long-awaited cryptocurrency plans. The company is reportedly seeking dozens of business partners, including online merchants and financial firms, in an effort to extend the reach of its blockchain-based marketplace. Facebook's would-be partners are being asked to pitch into an investment fund, valued at $1 billion or more, that would serve as backing for Facebook's coin and mitigate the wild speculative swings that make cryptocurrencies like bitcoin hard to spend. The pitch, according to the Journal, involves offering merchants lower fees than credit cards.

Some were quick to note that this would reduce Facebook's ability to make money from payments in the short term. But that may not matter much -- if, in the end, Facebook's crypto effort is really all about getting you to spend more time glued to Facebook. Facebook appears to be already building out the plumbing to make its marketplace a reality. At its F8 developer conference this week, the word "blockchain" was notably absent.

German police, together with Europol and law enforcement agencies from the US, the Netherlands, and France, have seized the servers of a dark web marketplace known as the Wall Street Market, on which users sold illegal products such as drugs, weapons, user credentials, and hacking tools, ZDNet reported Thursday. From the report: The site's seizure comes after a tumultuous two weeks for the Wall Street Market (WSM) and its users, during which the site's administrators have exit-scammed -- ran away with over $14.2 million worth of cryptocurrency from users and vendors' accounts. In this midst of all of this, one of the site's moderators -- named Med3l1n -- began blackmailing WSM vendors and buyers, asking for 0.05 Bitcoin (~$280), and threatening to disclose to law enforcement the details of WSM vendors and buyers who made the mistake of sharing various details in support requests in an unencrypted form. It is unclear if these extortion attempts succeeded, but days later, Med3l1n published the IP address (located in the Netherlands) and login credentials for the WSM backend on Dread, a Reddit-like community for dark web users. The IP address is in the same network range of another IP address that leaked from the Wall Street Market backend two years ago. Further reading: Feds Bust Up Dark Web Hub Wall Street Market.

An anonymous reader writes: Hundreds of developers have had had Git source code repositories wiped and replaced with a ransom demand. The hacker removes all source code and recent commits from vitcims' Git repositories, and leaves a ransom note behind that asks for a payment of 0.1 Bitcoin (~$570). The hacker claims all source code has been downloaded and stored on one of their servers, and gives the victim ten days to pay the ransom; otherwise, they'll make the code public.

Hundreds of users have had code repositories wiped and replaced with ransom notes. The coordinated attack has hit Git repositories stored across multiple platforms, such as GitHub, GitLab,and Bitbucket. Some users who fell victim to this hacker have admitted to using weak passwords for their GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket accounts, and forgetting to remove access tokens for old apps they haven't used for months --both of which are very common ways in which online accounts usually get compromised. Several users also tried to pin the issue on the hacker using an exploit in SourceTree, a Git GUI app for Mac and Windows made by Atlassian; however, there is no evidence to support this theory, for the time being.

Earlier this month, we learned that Microsoft's email services were compromised. Multiple victims now say that hackers stole their cryptocurrency. From a report: Now, multiple victims have come forward to flag what they believe may be one of the motivating reasons behind the breach: emptying peoples' cryptocurrency accounts. "The hackers also had access to my inbox allowing them to password reset my Kraken [dot] com account and withdrawal [sic] my Bitcoin," Jevon Ritmeester, a Microsoft user that the company alerted to the data breach, told Motherboard in an email, referring to popular cryptocurrency exchange Kraken. For verification purposes, Ritmeester provided Motherboard with the breach notification emails he received from Microsoft, as well as a screenshot showing what he said was an email forwarding rule the hackers set up: anytime an email mentioned the term "Kraken," his account would automatically forward it to a Gmail address presumably controlled by the hackers. [...] It appears Ritmeester isn't the only person who hackers stole cryptocurrency from due to the Microsoft breach.

E-Trade is getting ready to let its approximately five million customers trade cryptocurrencies on its platform, according to Bloomberg citing a person familiar with the matter. "The firm will start by adding Bitcoin and Ethereum, and will consider adding other currencies in the future." From the report: E-Trade would be one of the largest securities brokerages to allow crypto trading. It will enter into a competitive market with startups like Coinbase, which have made names for themselves as go-to places for such transactions. Closely held Coinbase reached a valuation of $8 billion in 2018 and projected sales of $1.3 billion. Fintech startup Robinhood, most recently valued at $5.6 billion, has also added cryptocurrency trading as a way to woo millennial customers. E-Trade could help legitimize cryptocurrency trading for wary investors. On Thursday, New York's Attorney General accused leading exchange Bitfinex of trying to hide $850 million in missing funds, causing the price of Bitcoin to drop 7 percent.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The price of Bitcoin has dropped seven per cent after New York's Attorney General accused leading exchange Bitfinex of trying to hide $850 million in missing funds. The accusation came in a legal filing [PDF] on Thursday that claims Bitfinex raided the reserves of Tether -- a digital currency that is kept at parity with the U.S. dollar in order to allow traders to switch easily between real and virtual currencies -- in order to make up the massive shortfall. Both Tether and Bitfinex are headquartered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands and, according to the NY Attorney General, are owned and run by the same group of executives and staff.

Tether is a so-called "stablecoin" and the company claims that every Tether virtual coin is backed by a dollar held in reserves, the idea being that people can be assured of its stability. But last month, on March 4, the NY Attorney General notes that Tether changed that assurance to note that "every Tether is always 100 per cent backed by our reserves, which include traditional currency and cash equivalents and, from time to time, may include other assets and receivables from loans made by Tether to third parties." [...] As part of that investigation, the OAG uncovered documents that purportedly show that in mid-2018 Bitfinex didn't have sufficient real-world currency deposits to meet customer demand.

Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder of SoftBank Group, made a huge personal bet on bitcoin just as prices for the digital currency peaked, losing more than $130 million when he sold out, WSJ (paywalled) reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report (alternative source): Mr. Son, who launched the world's biggest venture-capital fund on the strength of his long-term investing acumen, made the investment at the recommendation of a well-known bitcoin booster, whose investment firm SoftBank bought in 2017, the people said. The investment came at the peak of the bitcoin frenzy in late 2017 after the digital currency had already risen more than 10 fold that year. The exact size of the bet couldn't be determined, but bitcoin peaked at nearly $20,000 in mid December 2017 and Mr. Son sold in early 2018 after bitcoin had plummeted, the people said.

"Russian operatives used cryptocurrency at almost every stage in their online efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's final report on his investigation." So says CNN, adding that "Systems used in the hacking of the Democratic Party were paid for using Bitcoin, as were online hosting services that supported websites which published hacked materials and were used in the targeting of disinformation at American voters."

The Russian operatives (a.k.a. the Fancy Bear team) withdrew funds from both the CEX.io and BTC-e.com cryptocurrency exchanges to fund domain purchases, server rentals, and VPN services, reports Draconi, Slashdot reader #38,078. He's correlated the Mueller report with the Bitcoin blockchain addresses referenced (indirectly) in two indictments brought by America's Department of Justice -- one for interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, and one for the public leak of Olympic drug-testing results -- and shared the results of his investigation with CNN.

CNN reports:

Russian agents, including those from the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, had sought to, as the Mueller indictment of GRU agents last July outlined, "capitalize on the perceived anonymity of cryptocurrencies." But while Bitcoin allowed Russians to "avoid direct relationships with traditional financial institutions, allowing them to evade greater scrutiny of their identities and sources of funds," according to the same indictment, it wasn't enough to evade Mueller's investigation.

Tim Cotten, a blockchain developer and security researcher who has done extensive work in tracking Russian Bitcoin accounts unearthed by Mueller's team, noted in an interview with CNN Business that trading Bitcoins on exchanges usually requires users to set up Bitcoin wallets that are tied to an email address. Federal investigators were able to access at least some of the email accounts used in the operation, which, Cotten says, would have made tracing Bitcoin transactions a lot easier. Investigators' access to the "the other side of the blockchain equation," as he described it, was important because, "Rather than having to search the blockchain for clues, they already had all of the receipts demonstrating which accounts were under the GRU's control."

The Russians used stolen and false identities in setting up some of these accounts, according to Mueller's team, but had used some of the same accounts to purchase servers and website domains involved in the hacking of the Democratic Party and the publishing of the hacked materials, Mueller's indictment outlines. That, Cotten said, would have made it easier for investigators to tie the case together.
"The purchase trails are fully exposed in the Bitcoin blockchain as funds are used, consolidated, and deposited into secondary online wallets such as SpectroCoin.com and Xapo.com," Cotten writes on his site. "Anyone can follow along and trace the payment chains to see exactly how the Russians were spending their money, when, and on what."

Three Romanians ran a complicated online fraud operation -- along with a massive malware botnet -- for nine years, reports ZDNet, netting tens of millions of US dollars, but their crime spree is now over. But now they're all facing long prison sentences.

"The three were arrested in late 2016 after the FBI and Symantec had silently stalked their malware servers for years, patiently waiting for the highly skilled group to make mistakes that would leave enough of a breadcrumb trail to follow back to their real identities."

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: The group started from simple eBay scams [involving non-existent cars and even a fake trucking company] to running one of the most widespread keylogger trojans around. They were considered one of the most advanced groups around, using PGP email and OTR encryption when most hackers were defacing sites under the Anonymous moniker, and using multiple proxy layers to protect their infrastructure. The group operated tens of fake websites, including a Yahoo subsidiary clone, conned and stole money from their own money mules, and were of the first groups to deploy Bitcoin crypto-mining malware on desktops, when Bitcoin could still be mined on PCs.

The Bayrob group was led by one of Romania's top IT students, who went to the dark side and helped create a malware operation that took nine years for US authorities and the FBI to track and eventually take down. Before turning hacker, he was the coach of Romania's national computer science team, although he was still a student, and won numerous awards in programming and CS contests.

China's state planner wants to eliminate bitcoin mining in the country, according to a draft list of industrial activities the agency is seeking to stop in a sign of growing government pressure on the cryptocurrency sector. From a report: China is the world's largest market for computer hardware designed to mine bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, even though such activities previously fell under a regulatory grey area. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said on Monday it was seeking public opinions on a revised list of industries it wants to encourage, restrict or eliminate. The list was first published in 2011. The draft for a revised list added cryptocurrency mining, including that of bitcoin, to more than 450 activities the NDRC said should be phased out as they did not adhere to relevant laws and regulations, were unsafe, wasted resources or polluted the environment. It did not stipulate a target date or plan for how to eliminate bitcoin mining, meaning that such activities should be phased out immediately, the document said. The public has until May 7 to comment on the draft.