New card from Chinese payment giant UnionPay will allow spending of cryptoassets

New card from Chinese payment giant UnionPay will allow spending of cryptoassets

 Users of the new virtual card of the national payment system of China UnionPay will be able to replenish it with a crypto asset Paycoin, developed by the Korean company Danal, reports the South China Morning Post.

 Danal explained that the virtual card can be added to the Paycoin wallet, thanks to which the crypto asset will become available for spending in 30 million outlets working with UnionPay, including in China.

 Subsequently, UnionPay itself provided other information: “Danal users will be able to replenish their virtual card using Korean won and pay in local currency. Clearing between Danal and UnionPay will be in US dollars. UnionPay and Danal partnership does not include any digital currency transactions. "

 Users will likely have to convert Paycoin to fiat currency through the app before replenishing the card.

 The Paycoin wallet is used primarily in South Korea, however Danal intends to make it available globally.

Crypto-asset Paycoin is released on the basis of the HyperLedger blockchain platform developed by the Linux Foundation. According to the information on the project's own website, it is available for trading on exchanges such as Huobi, UpBit and CoinOne.

ESET Researchers Reveal How Stantinko Mining Botnet Works

Researchers at ESET have found that the cybercriminals behind the Stantinko mining botnet have developed several ingenious methods to avoid detection.

Malware analyst Vladislav Hrčka of cybersecurity firm ESET has posted the firm's latest findings and possible countermeasures against botnet operators on his blog.

“The criminals behind the Stantinko botnet are constantly improving and developing new modules that often contain non-standard and interesting methods,” he wrote.

The botnet has been active since 2012 and is spread by malware embedded in pirated content. It mainly targets users from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Initially, it carried out click fraud, ad injection, social media fraud and password theft, but in mid-2018, a module for hidden mining of the Monero cryptocurrency was added to the botnet's arsenal.

The module has components that detect antivirus software and stop any competing cryptocurrency mining operations. The module drains most of the resources of the compromised device, but pauses mining to avoid detection at the moment when the user opens the task manager in order to find out why the PC is running so slowly.

CoinMiner.Stantinko does not interact directly with the mining pool, but uses proxy servers. ESET released its first report on the cryptocurrency mining module last November, but since then new methods have been added to the botnet to avoid detection, including:

Obfuscation of strings - meaningful strings are created and present in memory only when they should be used.

Dead lines and resources - Adding resources and lines without affecting functionality.

Obfuscation of control flow - converting control flow into a form that is difficult to read, which makes the order of execution of the main blocks unpredictable.

Dead code is code that never gets executed, and its sole purpose is to make files more legitimate.

Idle Code - Add code that gets executed but doesn't do anything. This is a way to bypass behavioral detection.

“The most famous feature of this module is how it obfuscates data to interfere with analysis and avoid detection. Because of the use of source-level obfuscation with a grain of randomness and the fact that Stantinko operators compile this module for each new victim, each module fetch is unique, ”Hrchka noted in a November report.

Former CEO of Bakkt Kelly Loeffler suspected of insider trading

Former CEO of crypto platform Bakkt, Kelly Loeffler, sold more than a million dollars worth of shares ahead of the stock market crash, after being informed of the likely consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, writes The Daily Beast.

Loeffler was appointed by Georgia Senator Brian Kemp in December and took office on January 6. According to her report, she made the first sale of shares on January 24, the same day that a closed meeting of the US Senate Health Committee on the topic of coronavirus took place. Then she sold shares of Resideo Technologies in the amount of $ 50,001 to $ 100,000. Subsequently, their value fell by more than two times. A total of 29 such transactions were carried out.

As noted by The Daily Beast, the law does not allow members of Congress to make investment decisions based on non-public information.

“This is a laughable and unfounded attack,” Loeffler commented on the press statements this morning. - I do not make investment decisions within my portfolio. Investment decisions are made by many third-party consultants without my and my spouse's knowledge or involvement. "

Loeffler's spouse is Jeffrey Sprecher, Chairman and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, which manages the New York Stock Exchange and Bakkt.

“The periodic transaction report for the Senate confirms that I was notified of these purchases and sales on February 16, 2020 - three weeks after they were made,” adds Loeffler.

Loeffler became the second senator seen in a major stock sale since the January 24 meeting and before the market crash. Senator Richard Burr, who chairs the exploration committee, sold between $ 500,000 and $ 1.5 million in shares in February. In 2012, he was one of three Senators who voted against amendments that would have limited insider trading in Congress.

Since her appointment to the Senate on Jan.6 and until Jan.23, Loeffler has not announced a single stock market transaction. From January 24 to February 14, she and her husband sold shares in the amount of $ 1,275,000 to $ 3,100,000. On February 14, she also acquired Citrix shares and invested $ 100,000 to $ 250,000 in Oracle shares, the value of which has since fallen more than by 18%. The shares of 15 companies sold by Loeffler lost more than a third of their value on average. Initially, she stated that the shares belonged to her husband, but then changed the accounts, indicating that they owned most of them together.