South Korea’s financial regulator announced Friday that it would ban all initial coin offerings effective immediately. Even further, all virtual currency trading will be more tightly controlled and monitored by the government. According to local reports Friday, the decision was made after a meeting of senior officials from relevant ministries, led by the Financial Services Commission. Kim Yong-beom, vice ...

Fresh from reports that nearly 1,000 websites were found using JavaScript injections to hijack the computers of visitors as a means to mine for cryptocurrency, new research has uncovered malware targeting older Windows servers for exactly the same purpose. The Monero-mining malware is believed to have been in the wild since May and is targeting servers running Windows ...

An application by Grayscale Investments LLC to take its Bitcoin Investment Trust public has been withdrawn over fears that it would be rejected by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The trust was seeking to raise $500 million with an investment objective that the registered shares would reflect the performance of the value of bitcoin, before liabilities and expenses of ...

Just over a month since being acquired by Amazon.com Inc., Whole Foods Market disclosed Thursday that some of its point-of-sale terminals had been hacked, resulting in the theft of customer data, including credit details. How many Whole Foods outlets were affected by the hack was not made clear, but the company said the compromise of its systems only affected ...

Silicon Valley self-driving car technology startup Drive.ai has raised $15 million in a new round from GrabTaxi Holdings Pte Ltd., an Uber Technologies Inc. rival and Southeast Asia’s largest ride-hailing service. Founded in 2015 by former lab partners from Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, Drive.ai is building a platform that applies deep learning and AI to deliver ...

Flat-pack furniture retailer IKEA Group has acquired TaskRabbit Inc., a San Francisco-based startup that provides an on-demand hiring platform often used to hire people to put together IKEA furniture. Founded in 2008, TaskRabbit offers an app from which users can hire what they call “Taskers” to assist with everyday chores such as cleaning, delivery, moving and handyman ...

North Korea latest act of maleficence doesn’t involve nuclear weapons but something still deeply concerning to the cyrptocurrency community: bitcoin hacking. The rogue state is alleged by South Korea to have been intentionally targeting bitcoin exchanges, albeit rather poorly, like its missile technology. North Korea is accused of stealing more than 100 million won ($88,100) in ...

Chinese e-commerce company Meituan Dianping, which no one in the West likely has ever heard of, is close to finalizing a $3 billion venture capital fundraising on a $28 billion valuation, making it the fifth largest tech startup in the world. Previous investor Tencent Holdings Ltd., the operator of WeChat, is leading the round, with Los Angeles-based Capital ...

Lyft Inc. has signed a partnership agreement with the Ford Motor Co. that will see the two companies working together to deliver self-driving vehicles to American roads by 2021. The deal, announced late Tuesday, will involve employees from both companies working together to develop software that will allow Ford’s self-driving vehicles to communicate directly with Lyft’s smartphone ...

Anyone who uses a service online knows that the company behind it gathers personal information. Just how much information some companies store has now been exposed by a European journalist who requested data from Tinder and received a staggering 800 pages in return. German reporter Judith Duportail made the request for a copy of data ...