Weekly Crypto Round Up: Latest News on Cryptocurrencies & the Dark Web | Week 40 – 2018

Posted on the 05 October 2018 by Darkwebnews @darkwebnews

Bitcoin (BTC) is rotating around the $6,500 price mark for the third week in a row now, as other altcoins were mostly in the green with slight improvements compared to the previous week.

The second largest coin by market cap, Ethereum (ETH), is selling at a firm price, away from its year low that occurred last month.

The asset fell to $170 but is trading at around $223, at press time.

Tom Lee, the head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, predicts that the end of 2018 will be prosperous for Ethereum and, as Bloomberg reported last week, the coin will reach a new all-time high of $1,900.

Additionally, Lee believes that Bitcoin will trade at almost four times its current price, or $25,000.

In the meantime, the BTC dominance is still above 50 percent. However, it has been continuously falling in the past month.

Currently, Bitcoin holds 51.9 percent of the total market cap, which is standing at $219 billion.

French Agent Sold State Secrets in Exchange for Crypto on the Dark Web

A French security official, working for the General Directorate for Internal Security, has been accused of selling classified state information in exchange for Bitcoins.

According to French news outlet Le Parisien, the officer was trading confidential information he had access to, together with falsified administrative documents, on the dark web.

The amount of Bitcoin the agent earned of these confidential defense files before being arrested remains unknown.

The officer was detained on September 26 after agents of the Judicial Police discovered the leak. No links to terrorism have been found.

However, it's possible that the agent was collaborating with members from organized crime groups.

The accused could face up to seven years in prison and a fine of 100,000 Euros.

Stolen Facebook Data Surfaces on the Dark Web

If you happen to be one of the victims of the latest controversial Facebook security breach, you can now find your credentials on the dark web for the price of only $3 worth of cryptocurrencies.

The breach was first disclosed last week. Company officials revealed that nearly 50 million accounts were compromised by the incident.

Personal information of affected users is now being sold from $3 to $12. However, the transactions can only be executed with semi-private cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash.

Three software flaws, two of which were found in tools meant to improve users' privacy, made possible for hackers to break into users' accounts.

This has been going on since last year. However, Facebook discovered the breach the prior week.

As a matter of precaution, the company logged out 90 million users that may have been affected.

The account of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was reportedly included among the accounts accessed by hackers.

This is the largest security breach in the history of Facebook, and it comes at a critical time for the company.

Facebook has been hit with several controversial events involving user privacy this year.

The vulnerabilities are now fixed. However, the identity of the attackers and the range of their attack remain unknown.

Two Men Plead Guilty in a Multimillion-Dollar Darknet Drug Case

Maryland citizens Robert Swain and Ryan Farace pleaded guilty on Tuesday after being accused of making and selling drugs in exchange for Bitcoin on the dark web.

According to a report from the Department of Justice, the accused together distributed more than 920,000 counterfeit Xanax pills for more than $5 million worth of Bitcoin.

They managed to do this by communicating with their customers online through encrypted untraceable messages and shipped the orders through U.S. mail.

Farace and Swain conspired with others to launder the money, from July 2015 until February 2017.

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That's it for our summary of this week's major crypto news headlines. This is the 14th post in our crypto news series. See previous installments here:

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