Tag Archive for: complain

Victims complain they haven’t been paid

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Victims of the $200 million BitMart hack say that five weeks have passed since the crypto exchange vowed to return their money, but many still haven’t seen a dime.

“I’m not one to bitch and moan a lot,” said Paul DeLong, a business owner in Austin. “BitMart, from a communication perspective, they said that they were going to give us more updates. We have not received any updates at all.”

DeLong says he has reached out to the exchange multiple times, and each time, he’s received a canned response from a bot to inform him that BitMart and their attorneys are “working on it.”

In early December, BitMart wrote in an official statement that it would use its own money to reimburse victims of the large-scale security breach, which the exchange blamed on a stolen private key.

But users are getting restless waiting for BitMart to make good on its promise.

CNBC spoke to multiple BitMart users who were targets of the attack, some of whom face total financial ruin if their funds aren’t retrieved.

“Whether it’s $20, $500, $10,000, it doesn’t matter, just communicate back to us, and let us know,” said DeLong.

Many of the victims lost a particular token known as safemoon, which is a cryptocurrency token built on the Binance Smart Chain blockchain. The coin saw a massive run-up in the second quarter of 2021 after a slew of celebrity endorsements from the likes of rapper Lil Yachty and YouTuber Jake Paul.

CNBC reached out to ask whether BitMart still planned to make good on its promise to reimburse victims. The email address of BitMart CEO Sheldon Xia, which he lists on his unverified Twitter profile, bounced back, just as it did when CNBC first reached out to Xia in early December.

A spokesperson replied, “We will support all user withdrawals. We’re also talking to multiple project teams to confirm the most reasonable solutions such as token swaps. Any further updates will be announced on our official website.” The company did not respond to more detailed questions.

Victims plead for transparency

CNBC talked to more than a dozen BitMart users personally affected by the breach. One common theme across many of these conversations was a desire for transparency. The shared feeling was that bad news was…

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Activists complain of weakened voting security standard | Nation

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BOSTON (AP) — Leaders of the federal agency overseeing election administration have quietly weakened a key element of proposed security standards for voting systems, raising concern among voting-integrity experts that many such systems will remain vulnerable to hacking.

The Election Assistance Commission is poised to approve its first new security standards in 15 years after an arduous process involving multiple technical and elections community bodies and open hearings. But ahead of a scheduled Feb. 10 ratification vote by commissioners, the EAC leadership tweaked the draft standards to remove language that stakeholders interpreted as banning wireless modems and chips from voting machines as a condition for federal certification.

The mere presence of such wireless hardware poses unnecessary risks for tampering that could alter data or programs on election systems, say computer security specialists and activists, some of whom have long complained than the EAC bends too easily to industry pressure.

Agency leaders argue that overall, the revised guidelines represent a major security improvement. They stress that the rules require manufacturers to disable wireless functions present in any machines, although the wireless hardware can remain.

In a Feb. 3 letter to the agency, computer scientists and voting integrity activists say the change “profoundly weakens voting system security and will introduce very real opportunities to remotely attack election systems.” They demand the wireless hardware ban be restored.

“They’re trying to do an end run to avoid scrutiny by the public and Congress,” said Susan Greenhalgh, senior advisor on election security for Free Speech for People, a nonpartisan nonprofit, accusing agency leaders of bowing to industry pressure.

Seven members of the commission’s 35-member advisory board including its chair, Michael Yaki, wrote EAC leadership on Thursday to express dismay that the standards were “substantially altered” from what they approved in June. At the very least, the wrote, they deserve an explanation why the draft standards “backtracked so drastically on a critical security issue.”

Yaki said he was…

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Computer security specialists complain of weakened voting security standard

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California, Colorado, New York and Texas already ban wireless modems in their voting equipment. The standards being updated, known as the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, are used by 38 states either as a benchmark or to define some aspect of equipment testing and certification. In 12 states, voting equipment certification is fully governed by the guidelines.

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Activists complain of weakened voting security standard

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California, Colorado, New York and Texas already ban wireless modems in their voting equipment. The standards being updated, known as the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, are used by 38 states either as a benchmark or to define some aspect of equipment testing and certification. In 12 states, voting equipment certification is fully governed by the guidelines.

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