virtual currency

Officials in Lake City, Florida have voted to pay half a million dollars to hackers to regain access to computer files. It's the second such payment by a local government in the state in as many weeks. Lake City's government computer system was hit ... by a ransomware attack in which hackers remotely encrypt files and then demand payment to unlock them. They asked for 42 units of the digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin, worth roughly $500,000. That payment method makes it much harder to trace the recipients. The good news in this case is that public safety networks are unaffected and that all ... (view more)

Two Facebook millionaires want US officials to regulate an exchange for buying and selling the controversial "cryptocurrency" Bitcoin. The move follows a scandal when the largest such exchange in Japan went out of business . The Bitcoin currency ... isn't issued by any government or backed by any assets. Instead, each new unit of the currency is created when a computer successfully solves what's effectively a puzzle designed to slowly increase the amount of Bitcoins in circulation. Every time one user pays a Bitcoin to another, a publicly available ledger of transactions is ... (view more)

US Marshals are to auction off almost 30,000 Bitcoins, a controversial "virtual currency." The coins have a current market value of around $18 million dollars. The government confiscated the virtual currency when it raided an underground online ... trading site named Silk Road. Silk Road was not part of the ordinary World Wide Web, and could only be accessed using special web browser software. That made it extremely difficult to trace anyone using the site and their activity. The site was well known in the digital underground community for buying and selling services of both a legal and ... (view more)