Bitcoins Down MTGOX temporarily stopped all withdrawing requests

Bitcoin's value was hammered following a pause in withdrawals by one major exchange.
After trading at around $850 this past week, the virtual currency fell both Thursday night and Friday morning and is now hovering at around $732, according to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index. So what triggered the freefall?

Bitcoins down

MtGox, a major Bitcoin exchange, had announced that it was temporarily stopping all Bitcoin withdrawal requests in light of a technical issue in the withdrawal process. The process needed to be frozen for MtGox to fix the problem, according to a statement on its Web site:

In our efforts to resolve the issue being encountered by various bitcoin withdrawals, it was determined that the increase in the flow of withdrawal requests has hindered our efforts on a technical level. To understand the issue thoroughly, the system needs to be in a static state.
In order for our team to resolve the withdrawal issue it is necessary for a temporarily pause on all withdrawal requests to obtain a clear technical view of the current processes.
We apologize for the sudden short notice. All bitcoin withdrawal requests will be on pause, and the withdrawals in the system will be returned to your MtGox wallet and can be reinitiated once the issue is resolved. The trading platform will perform as usual for the needs of our customers.

Our team will resolve this problem as soon as possible and will provide an update on Monday, February 10, 2014 (JST).

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Yahoo malware turned PCs into Bitcoin miners

Yahoo malware turned PCs into Bitcoin miners

The cybercriminals who infected the computers of European Yahoo users apparently wanted to create a huge Bitcoin network.

Researchers at security firm Light Cyber revealed this week that one of the malware programs aimed to use the resources of infected PCs to perform the calculations necessary to run a Bitcoin network. Revealed earlier this month by fellow security firm Fox IT, the campaign spread its package by using Yahoo's ad server to deploy malicious ads. The malware took advantage of vulnerabilities in Java to install itself on computers that visited the ads.yahoo.com site.

The malware attack reportedly lasted from December 31 through January 3, when Yahoo took down the malicious ads. On Saturday, Yahoo acknowledged the issue through the following statement:

At Yahoo, we take the safety and privacy of our users seriously. On Friday, January 3 on our European sites, we served some advertisements that did not meet our editorial guidelines, specifically they spread malware. We promptly removed these advertisements. Users in North America, Asia Pacific and Latin America were not served these advertisements and were not affected. Additionally, users using Macs and mobile devices were not affected.


So far, Yahoo hasn't revealed any details on the infected computers or publicly advised affected users on what they should do. But security firm Surfright shed a bit more light on the situation.

Not every ad on the Yahoo advertisement network contained the malicious iframe, but if you have an outdated version of Java Runtime (you can check here) and you used Yahoo Mail the last 6 days, your computer is likely infected.

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