Overbit News for today begins with the announcement that Michael Saylor and his company MicroStrategy have made another significant Bitcoin acquisition.
According to sources, Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy has purchased another 7,002 Bitcoins for $414 million, keeping its promise to keep adding to their reserves. The company paid an average price of $59,187 per Bitcoin, which is lower than the all-time high of $69,000 but higher than the price on Monday.
The technology company, led by crypto bull Michael Saylor, has stated that it will continue to increase its Bitcoin holdings. This guarantee was confirmed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing published on Monday, November 29.
With this latest acquisition, their total token stockpile now stands at 121,044 at an average price of $29,534 per token. According to the report, its holding is worth approximately $6.89 billion at current prices, but the corporation paid $3.57 billion to acquire it.
Saylor told CNBC earlier this month that the company “will continue to acquire [Bitcoin] quarter by quarter, time to time, either with cash flows or with debt or with equity, just depending upon market circumstances and what looks most accretive to our shareholders,”
In early Monday trading, MicroStrategy’s stock was up 2.83 per cent at $681.73, bringing its year-to-date gain to more than 75 per cent. Other companies have made large bets on Bitcoin, but MicroStrategy is considered the market leader. According to Bitcoin Treasuries, Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla has 42,902 Bitcoins worth $2.45 billion.
In our second story of the week, we look at Google’s cybersecurity team, which revealed details in a report released on Wednesday. The “Threat Horizons” report aims to provide intelligence that will help organisations secure their cloud environments.
“Malicious actors were observed performing cryptocurrency mining within compromised Cloud instances,” Google wrote in the executive summary of the report. Mining for cryptocurrency is a for-profit activity that frequently necessitates large amounts of computing power, which Google Cloud customers can purchase. Google Cloud is a cloud-based storage platform that enables customers to store data and files remotely.
Google claims that 86% of the 50 recently compromised Google Cloud accounts were used to mine cryptocurrency, and according to Google, the majority of cryptocurrency mining software was downloaded within 22 seconds of the account being compromised.
Around 10% of the compromised accounts were also used to conduct scans of other publicly available internet resources to identify vulnerable systems, while the remaining 8% were used to attack other targets.
According to Google, malicious actors were able to gain access to Google Cloud accounts by taking advantage of poor customer security practices. Actors gaining access to an internet-facing Cloud account with no or a weak password resulted in nearly half of the compromised accounts.
“The cloud threat landscape in 2021 was more complex than just rogue cryptocurrency miners, of course,” wrote Bob Mechler, director of Google Cloud’s office of the chief information security officer, and Seth Rosenblatt, Google Cloud’s security editor, in a blog post. They also claimed that Google researchers discovered a phishing attack by the Russian group APT28/Fancy Bear at the end of September and that Google stopped the attack.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Overbit News; until next time, take care!