North Korea launched what may have been a ballistic missile at about 12:36 p.m. local time on Oct. 29, and it is presumed to have fallen near the east coast of the Korean Peninsula without reaching Japan’s territory or exclusive economic zone, Japan’s Ministry of Defense said on social media. Tokyo said Japan, the United […]
The Netherlands plans 25,000 government job cuts as it explores AI savings. See the 2027 timeline and steps for Dutch and EMEA public-sector IT teams.
The post Netherlands Plans 25,000 Job Cuts as Government Turns to AI appeared first on TechRepublic.
The Netherlands plans 25,000 government job cuts as it explores AI savings. See the 2027 timeline and steps for Dutch and EMEA public-sector IT teams.
The post Netherlands Plans 25,000 Job Cuts as Government Turns to AI appeared first on TechRepublic.
Bitcoin Magazine
Centralized Exchange and DeFi Losses Dominate 2026 Crypto Hacks Despite Hardware Wallet Failures
Crypto hacks have produced roughly $2.35 billion in net losses so far in 2026 after freezes and returns, according to a report by Lightning.news shared with Bitcoin Magazine. A security researcher by the name of Stacy Muur posted on X compiled “a list of protocols that were hacked for more than $50,000 in 2026.” 230 protocols year-to-date. “Crypto security is absolutely cooked.” September alone accounted for about $768 million in Muur’s tally, driven mainly by centralized exchanges and DeFi rather than pure Bitcoin self-custody hardware wallets, which got significant news coverage at the time.
The largest single loss was Bitget’s September 24 drain of roughly $387.5 million from hot and warm wallets. The exchange and firms including Chainalysis, Elliptic, and TRM Labs have linked the incident to North Korea, citing IP patterns consistent with prior DPRK-linked VPN use, on-chain overlaps with wallets tied to earlier Lazarus Group and TraderTraitor activity, including the 2025 Bybit theft. Attackers used third-party security products to inject fraudulent withdrawal commands without taking private keys.
Liquid Network, Blockstream’s Bitcoin sidechain, took the next-largest hit when attackers exploited an Elements software bug in early September to mint about 4,000 unbacked L-BTC and peg them out for roughly 4,000 real bitcoins, valued near $320 million at the time. The self-described white-hat actors returned 3,400 BTC after negotiations conducted on-chain via OP_RETURN messages and kept about 600 BTC. No federation keys were compromised. The loss came from a type of inflation bug on the Liquid network protocol.
Samson Mow later called the episode part of an “avalanche of AI-assisted attacks” that had already reached other Bitcoin-adjacent software before hitting Liquid. The network is back and running now, having covered the losses, presumably from investors.
DeFi platforms showed the same pattern of concentrated, high-value losses. Drift Protocol lost approximately $285–296 million in an April governance and multisig compromise that involved months of social engineering. An investigation commissioned by the project attributed the operation to North Korean actors.
KelpDAO’s LayerZero-powered rsETH bridge was drained of roughly $292 million in unbacked tokens after a single-verifier design was subverted. LayerZero stated that preliminary indicators pointed to DPRK’s Lazarus Group, specifically TraderTraitor.
Tectonic on Cronos saw about $120.4 million borrowed against manipulated collateral in late August. Validators later rewound the chain and recovered the majority, though several million dollars that had already been bridged off-network were not restored.
Incidents involving Bitcoin hardware wallets were smaller in aggregate despite the wide news coverage. Galaxy Research placed the Coinkite RNG hack values in the range of roughly 1,596–1,789 BTC, on the order of $100–130 million, with higher upper-bound estimates near 2,055 BTC.
Ledger losses of roughly $86–102 million traced to devices sold through the authorized Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis, where an unauthorized hardware implant captured recovery phrases during setup, a supply chain attack. The company stated that confirmed cases were limited to that reseller’s supply chain and that its own systems and direct sales were unaffected, though there are unconfirmed reports of such bugged devices making it to German markets. Combined, however, these hardware-adjacent events remain well below the single largest CEX and DeFi incidents.
The year has also coincided with the practical deployment of AI coding agents capable of scanning codebases for vulnerabilities and automating exploit development. Muur has stated that “AI is definitely making it much easier to find and exploit bugs. I think we’re entering a pretty serious cybersecurity arms race.”
Reports note that code-flaw exploits accelerated after the February release of models such as GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6, which showed high success rates on smart-contract bug benchmarks at low cost.
OpenAI has disclosed internal testing cases in which agents accessed unauthorized test-network funds or bypassed controls to complete tasks. Most of the year’s largest heists still relied on traditional vectors such as key compromise, social engineering, and infrastructure flaws, but the lowered barrier for discovering and weaponizing bugs adds a new layer of risk, particularly for complex smart-contract systems and sidechains.
Bitcoin’s base layer itself has not been the source of these losses. The bulk of the 2026 damage has concentrated in CEX hot-wallet infrastructure, DeFi governance, oracle designs, and Bitcoin sidechain code, while pure self-custody hardware wallets, even when imperfect, have accounted for a distinctly smaller share. Nevertheless, calls for an update to self custody recommendations have emerged from industry leaders, pushing forward multivendor multisig wallets as the future of niche industry.
This post Centralized Exchange and DeFi Losses Dominate 2026 Crypto Hacks Despite Hardware Wallet Failures first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.
Having watched some fun videos on repurposed satellite dishes on YouTube, [Melan] wanted to get in on the action, managed to source an Intellian i4 — a dish built for marine use — and set about hacking it.
[Melan] first needed to convince the antenna that it was still on a boat by using an RP2040 microcontroller and an RS-422 module to send NMEA sentences. This was necessary to tell the i4 the “heading” of the “boat”, even though [Melan] was really using the rig stationary on land. From there, a simple email to the company itself sufficed to get the Intellian software running on the antenna.
But could it be controlled without the software?. Sniff the communications between the software and the Antenna Control Unit, and decompile the code. This done, it was relatively straightforward to put together a protocol description and figure out how to command the antenna where to point simply by issuing commands for azimuth and elevation.
We’ve featured other great bits of satellite equipment before, like this truck tracker teardown from a few years ago. If you’ve got some nice equipment on the bench that listens in on (or transmits out to) birds in space, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.
Ukraine says Starlink service has been restored after days of disruption. The incident highlights why enterprises need tested, independent backup systems.
The post Starlink Restrictions Explained: What Enterprises Can Learn appeared first on TechRepublic.
Greece’s under-15 social media ban starts Jan. 1, 2027. Learn who is affected, how age checks will work, and what users should know about privacy.
The post Greece Passes Under-15 Social Media Ban Starting January appeared first on TechRepublic.
Ukraine says Starlink service has been restored after days of disruption. The incident highlights why enterprises need tested, independent backup systems.
The post Starlink Restrictions Explained: What Enterprises Can Learn appeared first on TechRepublic.
Greece’s under-15 social media ban starts Jan. 1, 2027. Learn who is affected, how age checks will work, and what users should know about privacy.
The post Greece Passes Under-15 Social Media Ban Starting January appeared first on TechRepublic.
Bitcoin Magazine
South Korea Weighs Fourth Delay of Crypto Tax, With 2029 Start Tied to U.S. Data Sharing
South Korea’s presidential office is reviewing a fourth postponement of the country’s 22% tax on crypto gains, with a 2029 start date gaining support among lawmakers and industry groups.
The tax is scheduled to take effect January 1, 2027. The presidential office said it is in talks with government agencies about a delay, citing gaps in the regulatory framework and the problem of treating domestic and overseas trades the same way, according to Newsis reporting.
The levy dates to a 2020 amendment to the Income Tax Act. It applies a 20% national rate plus a 2% local rate to annual income from the transfer or lending of virtual assets above a 2.5 million won ($1,888) deduction. The start date was set for 2022, then pushed to 2023, 2025 and 2027 as officials conceded that tax systems and investor protections were not ready.
The argument for 2029 rests on the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework, the standard under which tax authorities swap crypto transaction records with one another. South Korea is among the first group of jurisdictions set to begin exchanges in 2027. The United States does not join until 2029.
A presidential office official told Newsis that the absence of U.S. trading data is the biggest bottleneck. Without it, the National Tax Service would have to chase overseas transactions one by one, and Korean traders on domestic exchanges would carry a heavier burden than those on foreign platforms or in self-custody.
On October 16, Democratic Party lawmaker Park Min-gyu and 13 colleagues filed a bill that would push the tax to January 1 of the second year after the first international data exchange, which works out to 2029. People Power Party lawmaker Song Eon-seok filed a separate bill to strike the crypto tax provisions from the law.
The Korea Digital Asset Business Association backed the 2029 date Thursday and asked the government to pass a digital asset law with stock-market-grade investor protections before any tax takes effect.
The pressure has come from several directions at once. Last week, two public petitions, one to repeal the tax and one to defer it two years, each cleared the 50,000 signatures that force a legislative review. Democratic Party leader Kim Min-seok called for a “thorough final review,” a shift for a party that had held the line on 2027.
Finance Minister Lee Hyeong-il told a parliamentary audit Thursday the government would decide “after carefully considering and gathering all opinions from the industry and the National Assembly.” Financial Services Commission chairman Lee Eog-weon said the same day that the tax should “take various circumstances into full consideration.”
The Virtual Asset User Protection Act took effect in July 2024, but the Digital Asset Basic Act, the licensing framework flagged alongside spot bitcoin ETF approval, has not passed. Lawmakers have questioned taxing a market before the law defining it exists.
The National Tax Service has not slowed down. It plans to publish a draft notice on taxable crypto income by the end of October. The government expects to settle its position through inter-agency talks after audits wrap, with a decision through National Assembly tax revisions between late November and early December.
This post South Korea Weighs Fourth Delay of Crypto Tax, With 2029 Start Tied to U.S. Data Sharing first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
A computer simulation run by South Korean and U.S. forces during this summer’s Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise ended with North Korean troops breaking through allied defensive lines and advancing to the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper said, a result that has deepened a dispute over when Seoul should take wartime command of […]
A French Navy Atlantique 2 maritime patrol aircraft has deployed to Romania and is supporting search and rescue efforts after a wave of drone attacks on merchant ships off the Romanian and Bulgarian coasts, while a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon has begun patrolling the Black Sea at Bulgaria’s request. The Atlantique 2 arrived in Constanța […]
China and South Korea completed a 10-day joint maritime law enforcement patrol in the Yellow Sea fishing zone the two countries share under their bilateral fisheries agreement, with the China Coast Guard ship Changshan and the South Korean fisheries guidance vessel Mugunghwa 42 sailing together. Over more than 210 hours at sea and more than […]
Bitcoin Magazine
Bank of Korea Wants Stablecoins Written Into Forex Law as Crypto Bill and Tax Fight Come to a Head
The Bank of Korea plans to draft an amendment to the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act with the government before year-end that would regulate stablecoins as a means of payment, according to a written submission to the National Assembly’s annual audit reported by Korean outlet Digital Asset.
The central bank’s October 22 report, a follow-up to last year’s audit, says it is consulting with the government on measures to regulate cross-border transactions in virtual assets.
While building a monitoring system based on foreign exchange network reporting, the bank said, it plans to prepare the amendment with the government this year to regulate stablecoins as a means of payment, among other aims.
That is a plan to write a bill, not a bill in itself. There is no draft text, no named token and no passage date. And “means of payment” is a defined term in Korean forex law: an instrument whose cross-border movement must be reported.
On that reading, the amendment would put dollar stablecoins under the same controls as a wire to New York, not make them legal tender at a Seoul convenience store.
The BOK pointed to settlement outside the banking system, mixers and regulatory gaps around personal wallets as factors that ease illegal transactions. Bitcoin holders who self-custody in Korea should take note: the country’s capital controls are the reason the kimchi premium exists, and a tighter forex net around crypto would entrench those controls rather than ease them.
The forex work runs in parallel with the Digital Asset Basic Act, the licensing and stablecoin-issuance framework flagged alongside spot bitcoin ETF approval in the government’s 2026 growth strategy.
Financial Services Commission chairman Lee Eog-weon told lawmakers Thursday that consultations are in their final stage and the bill will follow as soon as possible, Bloomingbit reported.
The BOK said it will work with ministries to limit transactions that exploit the gap until that law exists.
The gap has a date attached. Korea’s crypto income tax is due to take effect January 1, 2027, according to The Block, after three postponements, and lawmakers have questioned taxing a market before the law defining it is passed.
Lee said Thursday the tax should “take various circumstances into full consideration,” per Yonhap. Democratic Party leader Kim Min-seok called Thursday for a “thorough final review,” a shift from a party that had insisted on 2027.
Two petitions, one to repeal the tax and one to defer it two years, each cleared the 50,000 signatures that force a legislative review.
The National Tax Service has not moved: it plans to finalize its draft tax notice by October 30, Digital Asset reported.
This post Bank of Korea Wants Stablecoins Written Into Forex Law as Crypto Bill and Tax Fight Come to a Head first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
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