This week CipherTrace published its Q2 2019 Cryptocurrency Anti-Money Laundering Report. According to the report, approximately $4.26 billion in cryptocurrency funds have been lost in the first half of 2019 to various criminal activities including cyberthefts, scams, misappropriation and insider fraud. The report notes that hacks alone have resulted in $227 million in cryptocurrencies stolen from exchanges in the first half of 2019, and "exchange and infrastructure thefts" totaled more than $480 million. The report provides details on multiple 2019 trends related to global criminal activity, enforcement actions, regulatory developments and industry initiatives.

Late last week, Elliptic published the Elliptic Data Set, which is a "sub-graph" of the Bitcoin transaction graph. The dataset comprises "203,769 nodes and 234,355 edges," while the full Bitcoin transaction graph "is made of more than 438 million nodes and 1.1 billion edges." According to a press release, "[t]he task on the dataset is to classify the illicit and licit nodes, given a set of features and the graph topology." The press release notes that "[t]wo percent (4,545) of the nodes are labelled class1 (illicit); twenty-one percent (42,019) are labelled class2 (licit)" and the remaining nodes "are classified as 'unknown.'" According to the press release, Elliptic published the dataset "with the hope that it will inspire the academic and crypto community to help build a safer financial system based on crypto currencies."

According to cryptocurrency analytics firm Clain, approximately 4,836 bitcoins (valued at over $50 million) that were stolen from the cryptocurrency exchange Binance were recently sent to Chipmixer, a bitcoin "tumbler" that obfuscates the origin of funds on the Bitcoin blockchain. According to the report, "[b]ecause of this huge volume, it is correct to assume that any outflow coming from Chipmixer these days is likely related to the same owner."

This week more details emerged on an ongoing United Nations investigation into North Korean cyberattacks. According to reports, the primary operations of the hackers include stealing cryptocurrency "through attacks on both exchanges and users" and "mining of cryptocurrency as a source of funds for a professional branch of the military." Another report published this week provided details on a new type of crypto-mining malware attack that "employs evasion techniques to hide from analysis and avoid discovery."

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