When you have even just $100 in a liquidity pool, you dread the day you awake to it being gone.
Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Category Archives: Cyber Security, Quantum, Hacks, Fraud Alerts, Risks, InsurTech
Federal Privacy Commissioner Quietly Closed Investigation of RBC
The Tyee | Bryan Carney | Aug 26, 2021
Facebook says it gave Canada’s largest bank, RBC, the ability to read users’ private messages. But the results of its investigation remain secret.
An investigation into allegations that select companies — including RBC, Canada’s largest bank — were given access to the private Facebook messages of people using their apps has been shut down by Canada’s privacy watchdog.
The Tyee first broke the news that Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner was investigating RBC in February 2019, following a 2018 New York Times exposé on Facebook “partners” that were exempted, or “whitelisted,” from tighter data rules implemented in 2014-2015 in the wake of privacy scandals at Facebook.
These special “partners” — such as RBC, Netflix, Amazon, Spotify and others — were given access to every private message sent or received using Messenger, Facebook’s popular messaging platform, when users of the partner company apps linked them to their Facebook profiles.
See: Chelsea Manning Is Hacking Again, This Time For A Bitcoin-Based Privacy Startup
Because the data made available to these partners consisted of private messages, it was potentially more revealing and violated more privacy expectations than the data infamously acquired in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which allowed outside developers to gather data such as likes and friend lists on not only app users, but their friends.
The whitelisting deal involved access up to a decade’s worth of private messages sent to or received from friends of app users with an expectation of privacy.
Although the full extent of exposure through whitelisting remains unknown, there is the potential for the same kind of multiplier effect seen in the Cambridge Analytica case, in which 87 million Facebook profiles were harvested based on the responses of just 270,000 people who unwittingly allowed access to their friends’ Facebook activities by downloading an app.
This is because each app user who connected to Messenger will have exposed their messages to Facebook partners from every person who ever messaged them — whether those other parties had installed the app or not.
In 2018, when news broke about special agreements allowing some companies’ continued access to Facebook data — internally known as “whitelists” — Spotify and Netflix admitted they had the extra abilities, but claimed they weren’t aware or didn’t use them.
See: U.S. and States Say Facebook Illegally Crushed Competition
RBC was also named and had the same privileges — as shown in leaked Facebook emails detailed in the New York Times — but denied it ever had access.
Facebook confirmed directly to The Tyee that the bank had access to read, write and delete its app users’ private Facebook messages. Facebook declined to say if or how many times those privileges were used by the bank.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has confirmed to The Tyee that it shut down its two-year-long investigation of RBC five months ago, without any announcement. The office wouldn’t provide any information on its findings. It pointed instead at ongoing legal proceedings, targeting Facebook only, as the best course of action.
The end of the investigation may mean that Canadians and lawmakers, as MP Charlie Angus put it in a Jan. 31, 2019 meeting of Parliament’s Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics — will have to “take RBC’s word for it” that the data wasn’t accessed, stored or misused.
Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien confirmed earlier that there had been several complaints “on whether or not the Royal Bank was violating PIPEDA [Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act]” and that “RBC’s alleged role in receiving information from Facebook” was the subject of an investigation.
Continue to the full article --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
 |  |  |
|---|---|---|
 |  |  |
If you care about privacy, Browser settings to change ASAP: Chrome, Firefox and more
c|net | Rae Hodge | Aug 28, 2021
James Martin/CNET
Five minutes gives you better internet privacy. Make these browser adjustments now.
Privacy is now a priority among browser-makers, but they may not go as far as you want in fighting pervasive ad industry trackers on the web. Here's a look at how you can crank up your privacy settings to outsmart that online tracking.
Problems like Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal have elevated privacy protection on Silicon Valley's priority list by showing how companies compile reams of data as you traverse the internet. Their goal? To build a richly detailed user profile so that you can become the target of more accurate, clickable and thus profitable advertisements.
Apple and Google are in a war for the web, with Google pushing aggressively for an interactive web to rival native apps and Apple moving more slowly -- in part out of concern those new features will worsen security and be annoying for users. Privacy adds another dimension to the competition and to your browser decision.
See: Designing a Central Bank Digital Currency with Support for Cash-Like Privacy
Apple has made privacy a top priority in all its products, including Safari. For startup Brave, privacy is a core goal, and Mozilla and Microsoft have begun touting privacy as a way to differentiate their browsers from Google Chrome. It's later to the game, but Chrome engineers have begun building a "privacy sandbox" despite Google's reliance on ad revenue.
For all of the browsers listed here, you can give yourself a privacy boost by changing the default search engine. For instance, try DuckDuckGo. Although its search results may not be as useful or deep as Google's, DuckDuckGo is a longtime favorite among the privacy-minded for its refusal to track user searches.
Other universal options that boost privacy include disabling your browser's location tracking and search engine autocomplete features, turning off password autofills, and regularly deleting your browsing history. If you want to take your privacy to the next level, consider trying one of the virtual private networks CNET has reviewed that work with all browsers.
Chrome browser privacy settings to change
In the Chrome Web Store, click Extensions on the left and type the name of the extension you're looking for into the search bar. Once you find the correct extension in the search results, click Add to Chrome. A dialog will pop up explaining which permissions the extension will have for your browser. Click Add extension to bring the extension into your browser.
See: How Verifiable Digital Identity Will Protect Your Post-Pandemic Privacy
If you change your mind, you can manage or remove your extensions by opening Chrome and clicking the three dot More menu on the right. Then select More Tools and then Extensions. From here, you'll also be able to see more about the extension by clicking Details.
Firefox browser privacy settings to change
Firefox's default privacy settings are more protective than those of Chrome and Edge, and the browser has more privacy options under the hood, too.
From inside Firefox's main menu -- or from inside the three lined menu on the right side of the toolbar -- select Preferences. Once the Preferences window opens, click Privacy & Security. From here, you'll be able to choose between three options: Standard, Strict and Custom. Standard, the default Firefox setting, blocks trackers in private windows, third party tracking cookies and cryptominers. The Strict setting may break a few websites, but it blocks everything blocked in Standard mode, plus fingerprints and trackers in all windows. Custom is worth exploring for those who want to fine tune how trackers are being blocked.
Continue to the full article --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
| | |
|---|---|---|
| | |
Chelsea Manning Is Hacking Again, This Time For A Bitcoin-Based Privacy Startup
ComplianceX | | Aug 25, 2021
Chelsea Manning’s long blonde hair catches in a cool summer breeze as she turns the corner into Brooklyn’s Starr Bar, a dimly lit counter-cultural haunt in the heart of the hipster enclave of Bushwick. The 33-year-old best known for leaking hundreds of thousands of top-secret government documents to Julian Assange in 2010. While serving the longest sentence ever doled out to a whistleblower after she used the privacy protecting Tor Network to anonymously leak 700,000 government documents, she used her time in incarceration to devise a better way to hide the tracks of other online users.
By January 2017, she was seven-years into a 35-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth, home to the likes of former Army Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 14 fellow soldiers in 2009. As President Barack Obama prepared to leave office, he granted Manning an unconditional commutation of her sentence. Newly tasting freedom, she was contacted by Harry Halpin, the 41-year-old mathematician who worked for World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee at MIT from 2013 to 2016 helping standardize the use of cryptography across web browsers.
See: ISED: Cyber Security and Policy Statements
Halpin asked Manning to look for security weaknesses in his new privacy project, which eventually became Nym, a Neuchâtel, Switzerland-based crypto startup. Halprin founded Nym in 2018 to send data anonymously around the Internet using the same blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin.
Halpin was impressed by Manning’s technical knowledge. More than just a famous leaker who happened to have access to secret documents, Manning struck Halpin as someone with a deep technological understanding of how governments and big business seek to spy on private messages.
“We’ve very rarely had access to people who really were inside the machine, who can explain what they believe the actual capabilities of these kinds of adversaries are, what kinds of attacks are more likely,” says Halpin. “She’ll help us fix holes in our design.”
In prison she studied carpentry, but she never stopped exploring her earlier vocation. “I’m a certified carpenter,” she says. “But when I wasn’t doing that, I would read a lot of cryptography papers.” In 2016, she was visited in prison by Yan Zhu, a physicist from MIT who would later go on to become chief security officer of Brave, a privacy-protecting internet browser that pays users in cryptocurrency in exchange for agreeing to see ads.
She and Zhu were concerned with vulnerabilities they saw in Tor, including its dependence on the good will of governments and academic institutions. In 2020 53% of its $5 million funding came from the US government and 27% came from other Western governments, tax-subsidized non-profits, foundations and companies. Worse, in their opinion, the technology to break privacy was being funded at a higher rate than the technology to protect it.
Fintech Fridays EP52: Technology Due Diligence Process and Cyber Security Risks
“As the dark web, or Tor, and VPN, and all these other services became more prolific, the tools to do traffic analysis had dramatically improved,” says Manning. “And there’s sort of been a cold war that’s been going on between the Tor project developers, and a number of state actors and large internet service providers.” In 2014 the FBI learned how to decipher Tor data. By 2020 a single user reportedly controlled enough Tor nodes to steal bitcoin transactions initiated over the network.
Using two lined pieces of composition paper from the prison commissary, Manning drew a schematic for Zhu of what she called, Tor Plus. Instead of just encrypting the data she proposed to inject the information equivalent of noise into network communications. In the margins of the document she even postulated that blockchain, the technology popularized by bitcoin, could play a role. In the notes below she wrote the words: “New Hope.”
Continue to the full article --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
| | |
|---|---|---|
| | |
CipherTrace August 2021 Crypto Crime Report: Crypto Fraud Dips as DeFi Hacks Grow
CipherTrace | Aug 23, 2021
By the end of July 2021, major crypto thefts, hacks, and frauds totaled $681 million. While this number continues to be dwarfed by previous years’ highs, a breakdown of the types of thefts and fraud confirms a trend observed at the beginning of last quarter—DeFi-related crimes continue to grow quarter over quarter, with Q2 2021 netting criminals new highs in DeFi-related proceeds.
When breaking down crypto crimes by those DeFi and non-DeFi related, a clean pattern emerges. By July 2021, DeFi-related hacks total $361 million, already making up three-quarters of the total hack volume this year—a 2.7x increase from 2020. DeFi-related fraud continues to rise, as well.
See: How Corporations Are Protecting Themselves From Fraud
At the time of this report, DeFi-related fraud accounted for 54% of major crypto fraud volume, whereas last year DeFi-related fraud only made up 3% of the year’s total.
The proliferation and escalation of ransomware targeting critical infrastructure marks another disturbing trend in 2021. In July, REvil ransomware actors demanded $70 million—the highest ever reported ransom— for universal decryption keys as the US Government set its sights on combating ransomware the same way it combats terrorism globally.
On the regulatory front, the world is set to accelerate the implementation of the cryptocurrency “Travel Rule” as the global financial crime watchdog the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) declares that no jurisdictions reported being aware of any virtual asset service providers (VASPs) that are fully compliant with the Travel Rule.
See: Comparison of UK banking providers’ fraud controls
The lack of Travel Rule implementation globally is a major obstacle to effective global AML/CFT mitigation. As such, the FATF has indicated that one of its major next steps will be to accelerate the implementation of the Travel Rule across the world. This move comes as some countries, such as Canada, have postponed Travel Rule enforcement as VASPs continue to examine possible solutions.
Continue to the full article --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
| | |
|---|---|---|
| | |
Hackers steal $600m in major cryptocurrency heist
BBC | Aug 10, 2021
Hackers have stolen some $600m (£433m) in what appears to be one the largest cryptocurrency heists ever.
Blockchain site Poly Network said hackers had exploited a vulnerability in its system and taken thousands of digital tokens such as Ether.
In a letter posted on Twitter, it urged the thieves to "establish communication and return the hacked assets".
Hours after the hack, the attacker started returning the funds - first in small amounts and then in millions.
They started sending back small transfers totalling a few dollars to the online wallets controlled by Poly - but then began making much larger deposits, totalling hundreds of millions.
In scale, the hack is on par with huge recent breaches at exchanges such as Coincheck and Mt Gox.
'Biggest in history'
In its letter Poly Network said: "The amount of money you have hacked is one of the biggest in defi [decentralised finance] history.
"Law enforcement in any country will regard this as a major economic crime and you will be pursued.
"The money you stole are [sic] from tens of thousands of crypto community members, hence the people."
- 'We lost our life savings in a cryptocurrency scam'
- EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable
Poly Network said a preliminary investigation found a hacker exploited a "vulnerability between contract calls".
It urged various exchanges to block deposits of the coins, after millions of dollars in tokens were transferred to separate cryptocurrency wallets.
About $267m of Ether currency has been taken, $252m of Binance coins and roughly $85 million in USDC tokens.
Changpeng Zhao, chief executive of Binance, said his firm was aware of the hack, but added there was only so much he could do.
He said the group was "co-ordinating with all our security partners to proactively help. There are no guarantees," he added.
Poly Network is a decentralised finance - or Defi - provider, which allows users to transfer tokens tied to one blockchain to a different network.
Continue to the full article --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
| | |
|---|---|---|
| | |
Crypto scams, DeFi hacks, and rug pulls: Why the crypto industry needs insurtech
Insurtech Insights | Aug 5, 2021
When you have even just $100 in a liquidity pool, you dread the day you awake to it being gone.
Your bags are gone. How do you alleviate that concern? With insurance. Unfortunately, DeFi users don’t have much choice when protecting their assets, and only an estimated $2 billion of DeFi’s $100 billion TVL is insured. Needless to say, crypto and DeFi are still in the exploratory phase in finding an optimal insurance solution. Exploits have become almost inevitable and hidden in plain sight.
Many great projects have pushed the need for crypto insurance forward. At first, Nexus Mutual paved the way. They realized that when it comes to insuring DeFi assets, there wasn’t enough data to understand the events you’re trying to cover. They built a mutual where people could pool their collateral and vote on which claims to recognize.
See: InsurAce Founder at DeFi Insurance Protocol Explains the Difference between Traditional and Decentralized Insurance
The mutual system has been around for centuries. It’s proven to be a good measure when you have limited data and availability to judge, similar to the syndicated pool from Lloyds of London.
Evolving methods for crypto insurance
In the sense of adapting to the blockchain, methods are evolving. All the data is public and transparent. Certain risks are starting to occur, giving us insight into what needs to be covered: flash loans, bugs, rug pulls, etc. Downside risks should be covered through automated systems over mutual insurance because even though mutual coverage is suitable for the start, it has varying effects, particularly when paired with governance.
Even though you’re covered, if people don’t vote objectively, you don’t get the coverage even if an event happens. We should automate the process to remove unpredictable human elements as much as possible. Crypto insurance can be built entirely with code for efficiency and reliability, providing an answer for the cumbersome claims process.
Insurance in crypto today is poorly built. What’s more, the only insurance we have is retail insurance, and it typically relies on the mutual system. Say Bob wants insurance for an event, so he goes to Alice for the $100 worth of coverage he wants. When an event happens, Bob goes to Alice to recover the $100. But first, he must wait for a vote to see if he gets the insurance.
See: Revolut and Chubb Team Up to Provide Insurance Options to Fintech’s customers
The mutual system is proving to be fundamentally flawed and doesn’t provide optimal coverage for policyholders. We saw its flaws surface last February when a risk event took place for a covered protocol. Everyone was insured, but none of the people in charge of voting or insurance voted. No one got covered for their downside. Ironically, the insurance itself has introduced a new form of risk. If the goal is to decentralize and live on smart contracts, we haven’t done that yet.
Even with insurance, people are trying to share specific risks. Insurance often covers particular risks with particular criteria, but that approach isn’t always ideal. Instead, the process should focus on standardization and generalization while building insurance into an options and derivatives market in the sense where you make an agreement that, if this event happened, then you’re covered.
The current insurance model is fundamentally flawed. In DeFi, we typically see coverage for catastrophic events that arise from systemic failures inherent to protocol composability.
Insurtech
Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic has sparked debate over who should shoulder most of the costs from a messy event which is difficult to model and often left out of insurance contracts. “Parametric insurance” has predefined event parameters and a fixed maximum coverage amount; many believe this to be the best solution.
See: How decentralized finance will transform business financial services – especially for SMEs
Parametric insurance is one way that DeFi can embrace a more systemized and efficient coverage model. Parametric insurance, which offers pre-specified payouts based upon a trigger event, can be automated because of the innate transparency of blockchain data. If an event happens to meet the criteria, you get paid for the predetermined amount on the policy.
Continue to the full article --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
| | |
|---|---|---|
| | |
Podcast: Requirements for a fully functional CBDC
OMFIF | Aug 3, 2021
Charles Kerrigan, partner at CMS Law, and Seokgu Yun, founder and chief executive officer of Sovereign Wallet Network, join John Orchard, CEO of OMFIF, to discuss privacy concerns associated with central bank digital currencies, how policy-makers can address these and the challenges of launching a CDBC. As well as this, they share their perspectives about the underlying technology and set of features necessary for programmable money, an idea gaining momentum but which is often misunderstood. They also touch on the most significant trade-offs between design choices and briefly discuss how to build a CBDC that can adapt to future needs.
Continue to the full page --> here
Other links:
-
BIS Research: CBDCs beyond borders: results from a survey of central banks
-
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Central Bank Digital Coins (CBDCs)
-
FFCON21: May 13 Central Bank Digital Currencies CBDCs - The Future of Money
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
| | |
|---|---|---|
| | |
