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When the FBI successfully breached a crypto wallet held by the Colonial Pipeline hackers by following the money trail on bitcoin’s blockchain, it was a wake-up call for any cyber criminals who thought transacting in cryptocurrency automatically protected them from scrutiny.

One of the core tenets of bitcoin is that its public ledger, which stores all token transactions in its history, is visible to everyone. This is why more hackers are turning to coins like dash, zcash, and monero, which have additional anonymity built into them.

Monero, in particular, is increasingly the cryptocurrency of choice for the world’s top ransomware criminals.

“The more savvy criminals are using monero,” said Rick Holland, chief information security officer at Digital Shadows, a cyberthreat intelligence company.

Created in 2014

Monero was released in 2014 by a consortium of developers, many of whom chose to remain anonymous. As spelled out in its white paper, “privacy and anonymity” are the most important aspects of this digital currency.

The privacy token operates on its own blockchain, which hides virtually all transaction details. The identity of the sender and recipient, as well as the transaction amount itself, are disguised.

Because of these anonymity features, monero allows cyber criminals greater freedom from some of the tracking tools and mechanisms that the bitcoin blockchain offers.

“On the bitcoin blockchain, you can see what wallet address transacted, how many bitcoin, where it came from, where it’s going,” explained Fred Thiel, former chairman of Ultimaco, one of the largest cryptography companies in Europe, which has worked with Microsoft, Google and others on post-quantum encryption.

“With monero, [the blockchain] obfuscates the wallet address, the amount of the transactions, who the counter-party was, which is pretty much exactly what the bad actors want,” he said.

With monero, they’re obfuscating the wallet address, the amount of the transactions, who the counter-party was, which is pretty much exactly what the bad actors want.
Fred Thiel
CEO, Marathon Digital Holdings

While bitcoin still dominates ransomware demands, more threat actors are starting to ask for monero, according to Marc Grens, president of DigitalMint, a company that helps corporate victims pay ransoms. 

“We’ve seen REvil…give discounts or request payments in monero, just in the past couple months,” continued Holland.

Monero was also a popular choice on AlphaBay, a massive underground marketplace popular up until it was shut down in 2017.

“It’s almost like we’re seeing, at least from a cyber criminal perspective, a resurgence…in monero, because it has inherently more privacy than some of the other coins out there,” Holland said of monero’s recent rise in popularity among actors in the ransomware space.

Monero’s limitations

There are, however, a few major barriers when it comes to the mainstreaming of monero.

For one, it’s not as liquid as other cryptocurrencies — many regulated exchanges have chosen not to list it due to regulatory concerns, explained Mati Greenspan, portfolio manager and Quantum Economics founder. “It certainly isn’t enjoying as much from the recent wave of institutional investments,” he said.

In practice, that means that it’s harder for cyber criminals to get paid directly in the currency.

“If you’re a corporation and you want to acquire a bunch of monero to pay somebody, it’s very hard to do,” Thiel told CNBC. 

The digital currency could also be more vulnerable to regulation at its on-and-off-ramps, which is the bridge between fiat cash and crypto tokens. 

“I would wager to say the U.S. and other regulators are going to shut them [monero] down pretty hard,” said Thiel.

One way they could go about that: telling an exchange that if they list monero, they risk losing their license.  

But while the U.S. government can indeed keep monero at bay by marginalizing liquidity points, Castle Island Ventures founding partner Nic Carter believes that markets which allow peer-to-peer transfers of monero to fiat will always be hard to regulate. 

There’s also nothing to keep hackers within U.S. jurisdiction. Criminals could easily choose to carry out all of their transactions overseas, in places that aren’t subject to the kind of controls American regulators might put in place.

Bitcoin still rules ransomware

Cyber insurance is another reason why bitcoin is still the currency of choice for most ransomware attacks.

“Insurance is so important in this space, and insurers often refuse to reimburse a ransom payment if it’s been in monero,” said former CIA case officer Peter Marta, who now advises companies about cyber risk management as a partner with law firm Hogan Lovells. 

“One of the things that insurers will always ask for is what type of due diligence the victim company conducted, before making the payment…to try to minimize the chance that the payment goes to an entity on the sanctions list,” explained Marta. 

Traceability is more easily accomplished with bitcoin, given that its blockchain lays bare transaction amounts and the addresses of both the sender and recipients taking part in the exchange. There is also an established infrastructure already in place for officials to monitor these transactions.

Authorities keep lists of bitcoin wallets, which are tied to different sanctions regimes.

While monero does offer a greater degree of privacy over bitcoin, Holland points out that threat actors have mastered certain techniques to anonymize transactions in bitcoin, in order to obscure the chain of custody. 

He says that cyber criminals often turn to a mixing or tumbling service, where they can combine the illicit funds with clean crypto to essentially make a new type of bitcoin, at which point, they turn to currency swaps. 

“Just like you would do dollars to pounds…they may go bitcoin, to monero, then back to bitcoin, and then get a bitcoin ATM card, where they can just cash out dollars with it,” explained Holland.

So even though bitcoin’s blockchain is public, there are still ways to make it difficult for investigators to trace transactions to their ultimate destination. 

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Nvidia says it will record $5.5 billion charge tied to H20 processors exported to China

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Nvidia says it will record .5 billion charge tied to H20 processors exported to China

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers the keynote address during the Nvidia GTC 2025 at SAP Center on March 18, 2025 in San Jose, California. 

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Nvidia said on Tuesday that it will take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion tied to exporting H20 graphics processing units to China and other destinations. The stock slid more than 6% in extended trading.

On April 9, the U.S. government told Nvidia it would require a license to export the chips to China and a handful of other countries, the company said in a filing.

The disclosure is the strongest sign so far that Nvidia’s historic growth could be slowed by increased export restrictions on its chips, which the U.S. government says can be used to create supercomputers for military uses. Nvidia reports fiscal first-quarter results on May 28.

During President Biden’s administration, the U.S. restricted AI chip exports in 2022 and then updated the rules the following year to prevent the sale of more advanced AI processors. The H20 is an AI chip for China that was designed to comply with U.S. export restrictions. It generated an estimated $12 billion to $15 billion in revenue in 2024.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on the company’s last quarterly earnings call in February that revenue from China had dropped to half of pre-export control levels. Huang warned that competition in China is growing, and for the second straight year, Nvidia listed Huawei as a competitor in its annual filing.

China is Nvidia’s fourth-largest region by sales, after the U.S., Singapore, and Taiwan, according to the company’s annual report. More than half of its sales went to U.S. companies in its fiscal year that ended in January.

Nvidia’s H20 chip is comparable to the H100 and H200 AI chips used in the U.S. and other countries, but it has slower interconnection speeds and bandwidth. It’s based on a previous generation of AI architecture called Hopper introduced in 2022. Nvidia is now focusing on selling its current generation of AI chips, called Blackwell.

DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose competitive AI model R1 unveiled earlier this year upended markets, used H20 chips in its research.

In addition to the existing Chinese export controls, Nvidia also faces new restrictions on what it can export starting next month, under “AI diffusion rules” first proposed by the Biden administration.

Nvidia has argued that further controls on its chips would stifle competition and potentially even erode U.S. competitiveness in technology. The company previously said it moved some of its operations, including testing and distribution, out of China after the 2022 export controls.

At the company’s annual conference last month, when asked about Chinese export controls, Huang said Nvidia works to comply with the law, but he also noted that about half of the world’s AI researchers are from China, and many of those work at U.S.-based AI labs. 

Nvidia said in Tuesday’s filing that the U.S. government told the company on Monday that the license requirement for H20 chips would be in effect “for the indefinite future.”

Nvidia shares have dropped 16% this year, largely due to President Trump’s announcement of widespread tariffs on top trading partners. While exemptions have been made on various electronics products, including smartphones, computers and semiconductors, Trump and some officials said over the weekend that the reprieve was temporary and part of plans to apply separate tariffs to the sector.

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices dropped more than 7% in after-hours trading on Tuesday following Nvidia’s disclosure. AI chipmaker Broadcom fell almost 4%.

WATCH: Nvidia says U.S. requires license to export H20 products to China

Nvidia says U.S. requires license to export H20 products to China

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Figma confidentially files for IPO more than a year after ditching Adobe deal

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Figma confidentially files for IPO more than a year after ditching Adobe deal

Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma Inc., after the morning sessions at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 11, 2024.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Design software maker Figma said on Tuesday that it has submitted paperwork to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering.

The confidential filing lands 16 months after the company scrapped a deal to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion due to regulatory pressure in the U.K. The San Francisco startup had originally agreed to the deal 2022. Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee.

Figma’s software is popular among designers inside companies who need to collaborate on prototypes for websites and apps. The company was valued at $12.5 billion in a 2024 tender offer.

“There are two paths that venture-funded startups go down,” Dylan Field, Figma’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview with The Verge last year. “You either get acquired or you go public. And we explored thoroughly the acquisition route.”

The announcement lands at a precarious moment for the tech IPO market, which has been largely dormant since late 2021. The Trump presidency was expected to revive new offerings due to promises of less burdensome regulations.

But after filing their prospectuses with the SEC, fintech company Klarna and online ticket marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs earlier this month following the market turmoil caused by Trump’s announcements on widespread tariffs. Digital banking service Chime, which had filed confidentially with the SEC, also postponed its planned offering.

Turo, a car-sharing service, withdrew its IPO prospectus in February, three years after filing its initial prospectus.

Figma was founded in 2012 and is backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Durable Capital, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. The company, which ranked 26th on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list in 2024, had about $600 million in annual revenue as of early last year.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning off Instagram from Facebook in 2018: FTC trial

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning off Instagram from Facebook in 2018: FTC trial

Thilina Kaluthotage | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning out Instagram in 2018 on concerns about the rising threat of antitrust litigation against Facebook, according to an email presented Tuesday in a Washington, D.C. courtroom.

During Zuckerberg’s second day of testimony in Meta’s antitrust trial with the Federal Trade Commission, lawyers representing the FTC introduced an email from May 2018, in which Zuckerberg appeared to comment on the possibility of separating the photo-sharing app his company purchased in 2012 for $1 billion.

“And i’m beginning to wonder whether spinning Instagram out is the the only structure that will accomplish a number of important goals,” Zuckerberg wrote in the email. “As calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway. This is one more factor we should consider.”

Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, when the photo app had 13 employees and Zuckerberg was poised to take his company public in what, at the time, was the largest tech IPO on record. The purchase of Instagram and 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion are at the heart of the blockbuster antitrust trial that kicked off Monday and could last weeks.

The FTC alleges that Meta monopolizes the social networking market, and has argued that the company shouldn’t have been able to complete those acquisitions. The agency is seeking to cleave the apps from Meta as a possible remedy.

Meta disputes the FTC’s allegations and claims the regulator mischaracterizes the competitive landscape and fails to acknowledge a number of rivals like TikTok and Apple’s iMessage, and not merely other apps like Snapchat. Earlier in the trial, the FTC also presented an Oct. 2013 email in which Zuckerberg told other Facebook executives that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel rebuffed his $6 billion offer to buy Snapchat.

Zuckerberg also said in the 2018 email that the company’s “best estimates are that, had Instagram remained independent, it would likely be around the size of Twitter or Snapchat with 300-400 million MAP today, rather than closer to 1 billion.” MAP is short for monthly active people.

WATCH: Mark Zuckerberg takes witness stand on first day of antitrust trial.

Mark Zuckerberg takes witness stand on first day of antitrust trial

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