Tech News
PayPal has formally indicated that its merchants may now begin accepting bitcoin as one of their integrated payment methods. In a filing at the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) published today, the company details its future as a separate entity from eBay, a split which is due to occur by the end of 2015. In discussing its innovations, specifically Braintree, PayPal definitively mentions “digital currencies such as Bitcoin” as an official tool for merchants to use. The extract from the extensive filing reads: “A merchant can typically open a standard PayPal account and begin accepting payments through PayPal within a few minutes. Most online or mobile merchants can onboard quickly and are not required to invest in new or specialized hardware. Our Payments Platform supports growth with a variety of value-added services designed to help businesses of all sizes manage their cash flow, invoice clients, pay bills, and reduce the need for merchants to receive and store sensitive customer financial information. For our standard service, we do not charge merchants setup or recurring fees. A merchant can also integrate with Braintree to begin accepting payments with credit or debit cards, PayPal, Venmo, digital currencies such as Bitcoin, or other payment solutions with a single integration.” PayPal added that the tools such as Braintree, a mobile payments platform jointly partnered with Coinbase, BitPay and GoCoin, “are designed to help merchants increase the conversion rate of consumer purchases on their websites and mobile applications.” The official statement comes as little surprise in and of itself, with PayPal having hinted at Bitcoin integration in one or more forms since August 2014 when news of the Coinbase partnership broke. A private beta of the service was made available in January 2015 with Coinbase confirming on its blog: “After working closely with Braintree over the past few months, we are excited to announce that Braintree has opened up private beta access to accept bitcoin for all of its U.S.-based merchants. Braintree merchants can now accept bitcoin by creating a Coinbase account and adding a few lines of code to their existing Braintree v.zero integration.” Nonetheless, PayPal is yet to provide further details on the full extent of its plans for Bitcoin or the other cryptocurrencies supported by its partners, which in the case of GoCoin also include Dogecoin and Litecoin. EBay meanwhile has been supportive of the move, its president Devin Wenig stating that “Both eBay and PayPal are open to [Bitcoin]—PayPal is experimenting with it—and through our relationship we’re likely to do the same. I am very open to it.”
Dear reader. It seems that you are causing headaches in dark corners of the web. I pinpoint you specifically, as a reader of Naked Security, because I assume that if you are a regular to this site then you are more likely than most to care about whos watching you online. For the people trying to track you, profile you and sell to you, you are a problem. Historically, techniques for tracking peoples movements around the web have relied on HTTP cookies - small messages that tag your browser so it can be uniquely identified. Unfortunately for snoopers, profilers and marketers, cookie-based tracking leaves the final decision about whether you are followed or not in your hands because you can delete their cookies and disappear. It is no secret that some vendors have moved on from cookies - local storage, Flash cookies and ETags have all been used in-the-wild, either as cookie replacements or as backups from which cookies can be respawned. These techniques have been successful because they are obscure but they all have the same fundamental weakness as cookies - they rely on things that you can delete. The holy grail for tracking is to find a unique ID that you can not delete, something that identifies you uniquely based on who or what you are, not what you have.
On Friday, alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbrichts defense attorney Joshua Dratel condemned threats against Judge Katherine Forrest that appeared on the Dark Web earlier this week. The threats came in response to two recent rulings dismissing motions by the defense to drop charges and suppress evidence in the Silk Road trial. An editor on Hidden Wiki who goes by the name ServingJustice was the source of the threats, Arstechnica reported on Wednesday. ServingJustice allegedly posted: Katherine Bolan Forrest is the judge who is unfairly ruining Ross Ulbrichts life and chance for a fair trial, and then published what the anonymous editor claimed to be Forrests Social Security number, date of birth, and home address on the Dark Web. On Friday, Ulbrichts defense responded to the threats. I would prefer not to have to dignify these threats with a comment, but obviously, and as strongly as possible, we condemn them, Dratel wrote in a statement. They do not in any way have anything to do with Ross Ulbricht or anyone associated with him, or reflect his views or those of anyone associated with him.
Hackers are increasingly using domain name serves (DNS) amplification to deliver huge amounts of traffic in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, according to a white paper from security company Symantec. Between January and August of this year the firm observed an 183% increase in the use of such attacks, in which hackers deliver requests to DNSs prompting floods of traffic to the target. Candid Wueest, threat researcher at Symantec, said: Distributed denial of service attacks are not a new concept, but they have proven to be effective. In the last few years they have grown in intensity as well as in number, whereas the duration of an attack is often down to just a few hours. Such attacks are simple to conduct for the attackers, but they can be devastating for the targeted companies. Amplification attacks especially are very popular at the moment as they allow relatively small botnets to take out large targets. Attack patterns employed by hackers can move over time as companies seek to defend themselves against popular attacking strategies, in what is often compared to an arms race.
In light of recent, highly publicized hacks on Target, Home Depot, and celebrity iCloud accounts, people are wondering if hackers are evolving more quickly than our cybersecurity methods. Not so, says cybersecurity expert Michael Ricotta of Blue Fountain Media Development. We are just bad at using the security measures already at our disposal to protect our data, he says. Many of the hacks that are happening are the result of being too careless, Ricotta told Business Insider. Hacking is not something that is done by some guy wearing a cloaked hoodie hiding in some corner who knows more than anyone else in the world … There are people who have an understanding of how computers work and are able to find where people who do not know how computers work are improperly handling their own system.
FBI Director James Comey is urging Congress to take up the topic of encryption -- setting up a potentially historic debate on Capitol Hill over whether U.S. tech firms can be required to bake into their technology ways for law enforcement to legally access users e-mails, texts and other digital communications. In remarks at the Brookings Institution on Thursday, Comey used the phrase going dark to describe the decisions by companies like Apple and Google to encrypt by default more and more of their services. (Comey recalled his response when he learned of those decisions: Holy cow.) The problem, Comey argued, is that the process locks away for good some data that could be useful to law enforcement as it fights crime. The argument against that notion? That any time you create a means of access for law enforcement -- what Comey called a front door that the FBI can use with clarity and transparency -- it increases the chances that those with ill-intentions can get at that same data. It is a complicated dynamic, and Comey appeared eager to punt the confusion over to Congress. He called for the House and Senate to begin rethinking the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, better known as CALEA, which empowers the FBI to access electronic communications. The 20-year old law, Comey argued, should require companies big and small to build into their systems lawful intercept capabilities that arent stymied by encryption.