The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has obtained a court order to shut down a company that had already raised $600 million in an initial coin offering. Called AriseBank, the company was selling tokens to assist in establishing the “first decentralized bank to offer the first and largest cryptocurrency banking platform in the world.” In a media ...

The price of bitcoin plunged in trading Tuesday as news emerged that leading cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and related company Tether are under investigation by authorities on potential fraud allegations. The investigation was launched by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It’s looking into whether Tether, both a company and a cryptocurrency owned and run by Bitfinex (formally ...

Hoping to protect its users from scammers, social networking giant Facebook Inc. has banned all advertising related to cryptocurrencies, including anything to do with bitcoin and initial coin offerings. Facebook Product Management Director Rob Leathern said in a blog post that “misleading or deceptive ads have no place on Facebook.” The ban prohibits ads that ...

Chinese bitcoin exchange BTCC Technology Ltd. has been acquired by an unnamed Hong Kong-based blockchain investment fund. The move will allow the company to expand into international markets following mainland China’s crackdown on all things cryptocurrency. Founded in 2011, BTCC was China’s oldest bitcoin exchange until it was forced to close its doors in September because of China’s ...

An initial coin offering pitching an Ethereum blockchain-based token for the fruit and vegetable tracking has shut down in what appears to be another ICO scam. Called Prodeum, the company claimed that it wanted to build a new price look-up code system that would allow consumers to track where their fruit and vegetables came from. According to ...

The U.K. government has announced punitive measures against essential-services companies that fail to secure their networks, including fines of up to £17 million ($24 million). The measures, announced as part of the U.K.’s implementation of the European Union network and information systems directive, covers companies providing services such as energy, transportation, water and healthcare. It also ...

Microsoft Corp. has taken the rare step of issuing an emergency Windows update to disable a previous patch issued to tackle one of the two Spectre vulnerabilities in Intel Corp. chips. The patch, known as KB4078130, for all versions of Windows from version 7 (SP1) onwards, reverses a patch Microsoft issued Jan. 3. It withdrew that ...

Four armed robbers have held up a man and his family in the United Kingdom to steal his bitcoin holding, the second armed robbery involving bitcoin in the last week. The robbers targeted Danny Aston, reportedly a cryptocurrency trader, in the Oxfordshire village of Moulsford. The men were said to have tied up the man’s wife and put ...

Coincheck Inc., a Japanese cryptocurrency exchange that was hacked on Friday, resulting in the loss of around $400 million in NEM tokens, has promised to refund all of its affected customers. The response to what could be the largest cryptocurrency hack in history was surprisingly strong. Details of the hack were first revealed at a media conference ...

A form of automatic teller machine hacking previously seen in Europe, Asia and Mexico has made its way to the United States, prompting the Secret Service to warn financial institutions to be on the lookout. The Secret Service memo, obtained and described Saturday by security research Brian Krebs, details the “jackpotting” ATM hacking method that involves ...