For Daniela Barbosa — general manager of blockchain, healthcare and identity at the Linux Foundation and executive director of Hyperledger — digital currencies and cryptocurrencies have made it among the big banks at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In an interview with Cointelegraph shot against the backdrop of the Swiss Alps, Barbosa explained that in the few years she has attended the WEF, the presence of cryptocurrency companies has steadily grown. What's more, we should not be afraid of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). “CBDCs are [a]natural evolution of digital dollars and digital currencies.” While the WEF saw calls …

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit technology consortium that supports the Linux operating system, is backing a new blockchain-based project for the insurance industry. On Monday, the foundation announced the launch of the Open Insurance Data Link platform, a project that aims to reduce the cost of insurance reporting and create a standardized insurance data repository using distributed ledger technology. OpenIDL is a joint initiative of the Linux Foundation and the American Association of Insurance Services, a national insurance advisory organization in the United States. The open-source project brings together major global insurance firms like The Hanover and Selective Insurance Group, …

Layer-two project Cartesi has unveiled a rollup-centric design for its Cartesi Machine, a Linux-based virtual machine that would allow developers to run any type of computing application secured via blockchains. Cartesi’s design uses a slightly modified version of Optimistic Rollups, a layer-two technology developed within the Ethereum ecosystem, to power its virtual machine. In contrast with Optimism’s implementation, which uses this type of rollups primarily to maintain full compatibility with Ethereum smart contracts, Cartesi wants to offer a traditional development environment. The Cartesi virtual machine emulates a RISC-V microprocessor architecture, an open-source alternative to the ARM instruction set commonly used …

Blockchain technology has proliferated in a number of industries outside of the cryptocurrency space in the decade since Bitcoin’s (BTC) inception. The underlying technology of the preeminent cryptocurrency went under the radar in the early years of cryptocurrency adoption before projects such as Ethereum began to explore the range of possibilities of blockchain networks. While many startups looked to harness blockchain technology to power new cryptocurrencies, a number of mainstream technology firms began building their own enterprise blockchain systems that could be rolled out. IBM and Microsoft are giants in the information technology space and have led the development of …

Data privacy issues have been escalating in 2020 as personal data is increasingly being used to fight COVID-19. The Linux Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium, has today announced a new data privacy project featuring dozens of cross-industry giants like Mastercard and IBM. Called the ToIP Foundation, the new data trust coalition aims to provide a trusted exchange of data over the internet and establish a global standard to ensure digital trust. Blockchain consortium R3 outlines Corda’s potential for private transactions According to a May 5 announcement, the ToIP Foundation’s participants include a wide list of companies, governments and nonprofits across …

Distributed ledger technology provider Iota, Dell Technologies and the Linux Foundation are collaborating on Project Alvarium. In an Oct. 28 press release, the nonprofit Linux Foundation announced it was forming a new project with support from several major industry giants such as Dell, the Iota Foundation and IBM. Other partners to the project include edge resource marketplace MobiledgeX and global IT firm Unisys. The project, based on code from Dell Technologies, aims to build on the concept of a Data Confidence Fabric, which establishes measurable trust and confidence in data coming from multiple sources. The system would score data based …

Two threat analysts recently stumbled upon new Linux malware that keeps its cryptocurrency mining operations hidden. On Sept. 16, Augusto Remillano II and Jakub Urbanec revealed in a post on Trend Micro, a security intelligence blog, that they found new Linux malware. According to the analysts, this malware is particularly notable because of the way it loads malicious kernel modules to hide its cryptocurrency mining operations. Malware provides hackers full access to infected machine The analysts revealed that Skidmap masks its cryptocurrency mining by utilizing a rootkit, which is a program that installs and executes code on a system without …

United States-based retail giant Target is creating an open source blockchain project for supply chain tracking, according to an official blog post from the company’s VP of architecture on April 22. According to the post, Target ran a pilot test using blockchain technology to certify its paper products along the supply chain in 2018. The blockchain used in the test period was reportedly made open source on GitHub recently as “ConsenSource” — at least as far back as two months ago, judging by the repository’s update history. According to the GitHub documentation, ConsenSource is built on blockchain platform Hyperledger Sawtooth, …

This interview has been edited and condensed. Hyperledger, an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation, was created in 2016 to support the development of blockchain-based, enterprise-grade distributed ledger frameworks and tools. All the members of Hyperledger — including such major actors as Intel, Accenture, JPMorgan Chase, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Alibaba Cloud, Citigroup, Deutsche Telekom and many others — find their interest in blockchain technology and discuss it with Marta Piekarska, who is in charge of the project’s ecosystem. We met Marta at the Anon Blockchain Summit in Vienna and talked about computer science, conservative vs. progressive sectors of economy, …

The Shellbot cryptojacking malware has gone through an update and come out with some new capabilities, technology news website TechCrunch reported on May 1. Per the report, these findings come from Boston-based cybersecurity firm Threat Stack. The company claims that Shellbot, which was first discovered in 2005, has received a major update. The original Shellbot was capable of brute-forcing the credentials of SSH remote access services on Linux servers protected by weak passwords. The malware then mines privacy-focused monero (XMR). Threat Stack claims that this new-and-improved version is capable of spreading through an infected network and shutting down other miners …

A new cryptojacking malware has the ability to disable cloud-based security measures to avoid detection on Linux servers, research by information security company Palo Alto Networks Jan. 17 reveals. The malware in question mines Monero (XMR) and is reportedly a modified version of one used by the so-called “Rocke” group, originally discovered by cybersecurity firm Talos in August last year. According to the research, one of the first things that the malware does is check for other cryptocurrency mining processes and add firewall rules to block any other cryptojacking malware. The virus reportedly also searches for cloud security services by …

A new exchange says it has the goal of becoming “the most professional, global and secure marketplace for digital assets” — utilizing state-of-the-art technology that it claims can deliver a processing capacity of 1.5 million order matches per second. ProBit says its platform is “fast, robust and reliable” — helping to give its users an upper hand while trading. The company says security is a priority, and this is why it promises to store “95 percent or more of digital assets in a cold wallet” — protecting users against security breaches and theft. Hardware security keys are also being made …