Bitcoin will become “less important” for cybercrime payments: Kaspersky

Cyber ​​security company Kaspersky reported that ransom negotiations and payments may soon become less dependent on Bitcoin as a means of payment.

The Russian-founded firm attributed this shift to improvements in the technology that detects the flow and sources of Bitcoin, as well as increased sanctions and market regulation.

The firm added that cybercriminals will instead look to other digital currencies to facilitate their illegal payments.

When the price of crypto falls, the threat actors will stand to gain less and will therefore look to other more profitable forms of payment,” said Marc Rivero, researcher at Kaspersky Global Research and Analysis. Decrypt. “Another reason is that sanctions against ransom payments continue to be issued. As the markets become much more regulated and the technologies used to trace the flow and sources of Bitcoin improve, threat actors will naturally move away from this form of payment as it opens them up. to exposure and increases the chances of being caught.”

As it stands, cryptocurrency represents a huge part of the world of cybercrime, according to research from Chainalysis. Cryptocurrency addresses linked to ransom payments attracted $602 million worth of transfers in 2021, which the research firm claimed is likely an underestimate.

Digital currencies explicitly built with privacy in mind, such as Monero or Zcash, have already become popular among cybercriminals.

Jason Rebholz, a CISO at cyber insurer Corvus, said TechTarget that some of the world’s most important hacker groups, such as Darkside, not only accepts Monero, but offers a small discount for payments made via the privacy-preserving cryptocurrency.

Darkside was involved in last year’s Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, which left large parts of the United States with disrupted access to gas.

Private cryptocurrencies take center stage

Unlike Bitcoin, currencies like Monero have fundamental differences in their underlying technology intended to improve privacy.

As per a white paper from the Monero core development team, Monero looks to fix privacy issues affecting other tokens “by storing only one-time addresses for receiving funds on the blockchain.” Bitcoin receiving addresses, on the other hand, are visible on the public blockchain and remain the same across multiple transactions, which can help anyone who wants to track transactions and payment patterns.

Monero also used a technology called “Ring Signatures”, a method where the originator of a transaction can combine his signature with other parties, making the true origin of the transaction more difficult to trace.

In 2020, an analyst at Interpol Jerek Jakubcek as well outlined how he “hit the curb” when investigating a suspect who used both the Tor privacy browser and Monero.

“Whatever happened on the Bitcoin blockchain was visible, and that’s why we were able to get reasonably far,” he said. “But with the Monero blockchain, that was the point where the investigation ended. This is a classic example of one of several cases we had where the suspect decided to move funds from Bitcoin or Ethereum to Monero.”