Tag Archive for: flag

Solana price ‘bear flag’ paints $50 target as Wormhole hack exposes security hole

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Solana (SOL) became one of the worst performers among the top cryptocurrencies on Feb. 3 as traders assessed its links with the second-biggest hack to date.

$325M worth of wETH gone

SOL price dropped by 5.50% to below $96.50 as Wormhole, a bridge between Solana and Ethereum blockchains, reportedly lost $325 million worth of Wrapped Ethereum (wETH) due to a technical vulnerability.

Prior to the hack on Wednesday, SOL was trading as high as $112.

In detail, hackers tricked a series of Solana’s smart contracts into signing illicit transactions digitally posing as “guardians,” reported blockchain researcher Kelvin Fichter on Feb. 2, the night after the hack. He wrote:

“The attacker made it look like the guardians had signed off on a 120K deposit into Wormhole on Solana, even though they hadn’t. All the attacker needed to do now was to make their “play” money real by withdrawing it back to Ethereum.”

Wormhole said that it would add Ethereum’s native token Ether (ETH) “over the next hours” to back wETH on the Solana network on a 1:1 basis. However, the project did not clarify the source of the funds that would be used to buy ETH tokens.

Bear flag triggered

The selloff in the Solana market across the last 24 hours came closer to triggering a bearish continuation setup that may send the SOL price down by another 50%.

Dubbed “bear flag,” the pattern emerges when the price consolidates sideways/higher after a strong downside move, called “flagpole.” In a perfect world, the price eventually breaks below the consolidation range and falls by as much as the flagpole’s length.

So far, SOL/USD has been forming the same bear flag pattern, as shown in the chart below.

SOL/USD daily price chart featuring bear flag setup….

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DoD, State Lack Ability to Flag Cell-Site Simulators

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U.S. Department of Defense Press Secretary John Kirby participates in a news briefing at the Pentagon August 13, 2021 in Arlington, Virginia.

U.S. Department of Defense Press Secretary John Kirby participates in a news briefing at the Pentagon August 13, 2021 in Arlington, Virginia.
Photo: Alex Wong (Getty Images)

A slew of federal agency heads and the nation’s top intelligence official are being pressed to respond to what one influential senator is calling an “abysmal failure” by the U.S. government to defend its own employees from unauthorized cellphone surveillance.

“It has been a matter of public record for decades that phones can be tracked and calls and text messages intercepted using a device called a cell site simulator, which exploits long-standing security vulnerabilities in phones by impersonating a legitimate phone company’s cell towers,” Sen. Ron Wyden wrote Thursday in a letter to the director of national intelligence; heads of the FBI and CISA—the agency charged with defending critical systems; and the presumptive next chair of the Federal Communications Commission.

“While the threat posed by this technology has been clear for years,” Wyden wrote, “the U.S. Government has yet to meaningfully address it.”

Among other concerns in the letter, both the Departments of State and Defense have confirmed to Wyden’s office, he said, “that they lack the technical capacity to detect cell site simulators in use near their facilities.”

Cell-site simulators are cellphone surveillance devices that can sometimes fit in a suitcase and effectively hack phones remotely by exploiting a number of common design features. One such feature is the tendency hardcoded into a cellphone to always seek out the cell tower that’s emanating the strongest signal. While this is crucial to saving battery power and ensuring calls are properly routed, it can also be a critical weakness. By transmitting an even stronger signal—or in the case of LTE networks, on a higher priority frequency—cell-site simulators can force nearby phones to drop their connections and connect instead directly to the device.

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This kind of attack is not as easy as it used to be. The “handshake” between a phone and a cell tower is a multi-step protocol, which the simulator must emulate perfectly. Older…

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50th Space Communications Squadron stays sharp with Capture the Flag – Schriever Air Force Base

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50th Space Communications Squadron stays sharp with Capture the Flag  Schriever Air Force Base
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