TechRisk Notes#12: APT group laundered stolen cryptocurrency through mining; Tech leaders called for an AI pause; and more.
[2 Apr 2023] DeFi Safemoon LP was drained due to smart contract flaw, APT43 laundered stolen cryptocurrency through mining, Italy banned ChatGPT, and Europol warned of AI/LLM exploitation and risk!
Cryptospace Spotlight
28 Mar - APT43, a North Korean hacking group, has been found to be reliant on cryptocurrency, according to security firm Mandiant’s report. Mandiant’s report also said that APT43 uses cryptocurrency services to launder stolen currency. It added that the hacking group also rents cloud mining services in order to obtain cryptocurrency that cannot be linked to its original payment method. [more][more-Mandiant]
29 Mar - DeFi Safemoon token liquidity pool (LP) was drained approximately $9 million worth of tokens after attacker manipulated a faulty feature on its smart contracts.[more][more-securityanalysis]
Issue: The new code left the burn() function publicly callable, allowing anyone to burn SFM tokens from any address. This allowed the attacker to burn large quantities of SFM held inside the SFM:BNB liquidity pool, vastly inflating the price of SFM tokens in the pool. Then, by selling (previously acquired) SFM tokens into the skewed pool, the attacker was able to drain it of BNB liquidity, for a profit of 28k BNB, or $8.9M. [more-securityanalysis2]
Bitcoin ATM manufacturer General Bytes said that it will reimburse its cloud-hosted customers that lost funds in recent security incident. Along with the reimbursement for affected customers, the ATM manufacturer has also said they are encouraging all customers to migrate to a self-hosted server installation, where they can effectively secure their server platform using VPN. [more]
Investment bank Citibank forecasted the market of blockchain-based tokenization of real-world assets will reach between $4 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030. [more][more-citi]
Citi said that blockchain tokenization would supersede legacy financial infrastructure because it is technologically superior and it provides more investment opportunities in private markets. While “traditional financial assets are not broken, they are limited by traditional systems and processes,” it said. “Certain financial assets — such as fixed income, private equity, and other alternatives — have been relatively constrained while other markets — such as public equities — are more efficient.”
Polygon launched final Mainnet for zkEVM solution to scale Ethereum. However, co-founder Mihailo Bjelic advised developers to proceed with caution when using the new zkEVM. Mihailo said that “zkEVM can be recognized as the ‘holy grail’ of blockchain scaling” as “it offers simultaneously three very important features. First is scalability. The second one is security. And the third one is EVM equivalency, or EVM compatibility. All three are equally important.” [more]
Techrisk Select
AI friction: Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and DeepMind engineers has called for an immediate pause on developing advanced AIs [more] [more-openletter]. Meanwhile, Italy has become the first Western country to block advanced chatbot ChatGPT. [more]
Generative AI risk: Europol warned about adversaries using prompt engineering to bypass safeguards to generate malicious output, or impersonate others in online conversations - such as a bank representative or a government official. Europol also warned that Large Language Models (LLMs) could be used to generate highly convincing phishing emails to trick victims into handing over sensitive information. [more][more-europol]
ChatGPT data exposure: OpenAI noted that the software bug that caused ChatGPT to expose conversation histories from random users also expose payment details for some paid users. [more]
Microsoft Bing vulnerability: Wiz researchers discovered misconfiguration in a Microsoft Bing.com application that allowed them to modify Bing’s search results and potentially compromise the private data of millions of Bing users. [more]
WiFi flaw: Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a fundamental security flaw in the design of the IEEE 802.11 WiFi protocol standard, allowing attackers to trick access points into leaking network frames in plaintext form. The attacker can change the security context of the frames by sending authentication and association frames to the access point, thus forcing it to transmit the frames in plaintext form or encrypt them with an attacker-provided key. [more][more-securitypaper]
Medical device OT security: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that it will refuse to accept medical devices and related systems over cybersecurity reasons from 1 Oct 2023. In addition, all new device submissions must include detailed cybersecurity plans from 29 Mar 2023. [more]