The untold story of the PIVX hack

History Since the launch of Bitcoin in 2011, many new competing cryptocurrency projects have been created. Bitcoin and its clones like Lite coin use the first consensus protocol – Proof-of-Work (PoW), which has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that anybody who wants to control the whole network needs to generate more than 50% … Read more

Slow evolution of ERC-20

ERC-20, what’s next? History Why was ERC-20 introduced? Even though it was possible to create smart contracts representing “tokens” before the ERC-20 proposal but those smart contracts are incompatible to each other unless individual developers agreed to honor individual interfaces. There are various implementations of these “tokens” even via the traditional Bitcoin blockchain, though Bitcoin … Read more

Splunk certified

Some news: just got my Splunk certifications: “Splunk Certified Power User” (Cert-135865) and “Splunk Certified Admin” (Cert-136075)     Now looking for the “Splunk Certified Architect”!

Splunk “Loading…” issue – quick fix

Sometimes you can start experiencing the following issue: after successful login to Splunk, instead of a dashboard(s) it shows only short message “Loading…” and it is never ending. No menu is available, you can click on apps selector, but nothing happens. Restarting Splunk does not fix the issue, logs contain no errors. The resolution is … Read more

All aboard! Time to check-in on “Insight”

If you missed your chance to get a boarding pass to “Orion” mission, you have another chance: NASA is preparing “Insight” and this flight is heading to Mars the next year. Your name will be put to a chip on “Insight”. Hurry! Registration will be closed on Sep 8th.

Deface pages at Pastebin

Pastebin.com is favorite place for software programmers. They share code snippets, and by default a submitted “pastie” is publicly available. By some reason hackers also like to share HTML codes of defacement pages they use for compromised site. I wrote a script that scans Pastebin on regular basis, detects HTML code and renders it. Below you … Read more

Phishing, funny stuff

Recently I got yet another phishing email that invited me to do something urgently with my RBC account. Oh, nice! I have to install a security certificate in order to continue use RBC online banking. Too complex to be true, right? I checked the attachment and it was not a security certificate as was promised. Actually … Read more