Bitcoin Exposed; DNS Hacked; EU Cyber Law Passed

Satoshi Nakamoto exposed? As most readers know, Bitcoin is a crypto currency that was first invented by a pseudononymous mathematician who went by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. For years, many has sought his true identity. Now, Wired magazine has made a powerful circumstantial case that it is an Australian named Craig Steven Wright. "In the last weeks, WIRED has obtained the strongest evidence yet of Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity. The signs point to Craig Steven Wright, a man who never even made it onto any Nakamoto hunters’ public list of candidates, yet fits the cryptocurrency creator’s profile in nearly every detail. And despite a massive trove of evidence, we still can’t say with absolute certainty that the mystery is solved. But two possibilities outweigh all others: Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did."

EU passes cybersecurity law. "The new law will require online firms, such as Google and Amazon, to report serious breaches or face sanctions. The deal, following five hours of negotiations between the European Parliament and EU governments, was reached in response to increasing worries about cyber attacks resulting in security and privacy breaches. It still needs to be formally approved."

DNS Servers taken offline by DDoS attack. There are 13 root servers that are the core of the addressing function of the internet. On November 30th, according to The Register, 4 of them were taken offline by a DDoS attack. This is a proof-of-concept assault on a critical functionality of the network. "The internet's root servers came under a concerted distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack last week that effectively knocked three of the 13 critical pillars of the internet offline for several hours. . . . According to a first analysis of the root server attack, published by the root server operators on Tuesday, the attack occurred on November 30, 2015 between 06:50 and 09:30 UTC and then again the next day for an hour. Many, but not all, of the root servers received roughly five million queries per second, which was enough to flood network connections and cause timeouts on the B, C, G, and H root servers."