Cryptocurrency Mining Ads on YouTube, Physical Bitcoin Heist, Fitness App Revealing Locations of Soldiers
Infosec News
INFORMATION SECURITY NEWS
For The Week of 1/23-1/30 2018
The Information Security News Service is a project of LARS (Laboratory for Advanced Research in Systems) in the CS Department at the University of Minnesota Duluth. We send out top stories in information security every Tuesday (except during some academic breaks). If you have stories you’d like to see featured, please email them to infosec...@d.umn.edu.
CURRENT NEWS
YouTube Serving Cryptocurrency Mining Ads
YouTube recently started serving some ads that mined Monero in the browser. According to a Google representative, mining ads are a form of abuse that violate Google’s policies. The ads were blocked in a couple of hours, but the fact that this affects YouTube demonstrates how big this issue has gotten.
The First Physical Bitcoin Heist
Four armed robbers broke into a Bitcoin trader’s home in Britain, tied up a woman in the house and forced the trader - at gunpoint - to transfer some Bitcoin to them.
Relevant XKCD - https://xkcd.com/538/
Fitness Tracking App Strava Gives Away Location of Secret Military Bases
Strava recently released a heatmap of where their users go for runs. While the heatmap doesn’t contain personal information, it still leaks information about the location of soldiers in foreign countries. In a country like Afghanistan, where most Strava users are foreign soldiers, military bases very obviously stick out on the map.