Polish Bitcoin Adoption Escalating with Strong Ecosystem

All of this goes to show the financial sector remains insecure despite all of the recently issued warnings. Criminals often use malware to attack financial institutions around the world. In most cases, these efforts are more than successful, creating a strain on the financial ecosystem. Things are getting out of hand in Poland, though, as the financial regulator allegedly infected various banks with malware. A rather disturbing development seemingly orchestrated by foreign hackers. It is not often a financial regulator infects banks with malware. It appears the Polish financial regulator....

Earlier this week, the Polish government opened up the floor to bitcoin and blockchain issues, with an open meeting organized by a member of parliament that saw participation from the Polish Bitcoin Society. In a first of its kind meeting this Monday, October 3rd, an open televised session organized by economist and member of parliament Mirosław Suchoń saw a discussion and lectures that saw bitcoin and blockchain under the spotlight. The state of legislative regulation concerning companies in the bitcoin ecosystem in the country was among the main concerns bought forward by industry....

Shares of the Polish company inPay S. A. are available for purchase in public offering using the digital currency Bitcoin. The sale has launched on the Polish equity crowdfunding site Beesfund.com. With the public offer of the company's shares, the inPay team want to acquire financing for the quick development of the InPay system in Poland and Europe. InPay S. A. is selling 5,000 company shares, i.e. 5% of the total share capital, priced at 40 PLN each (about US $13). Arkadiusz Regiec, president of Beesfund S. A., said: "For crowdfunding platforms like Beesfund, Bitcoin seems to be the....

Palo Alto Networks has discovered a unique malware family that can mine bitcoins via the victim’s CPUs and GPUs. The malware, called PWOBot, is completely written in Python and compiled via PyInstaller, generating a Microsoft Windows executable, according to a Palo Alto Networks posting. The malware has affected European organizations, mainly in Poland. A Polish file-sharing service delivers the malware. The malware can download and execute files, log keystrokes, execute Python code and mine bitcoins via the affected computers’ GPUs and CPUs. The malware has been noticed as far back as....

While its government has yet to issue a firm ruling on Bitcoin, Poland’s Ministry of Finance is on record saying Bitcoin is at least not illegal. Speaking at a seminar on Bitcoin legality last week in Warsaw, Szymon Wozniak, an official representative of the finance ministry, said: “What is not forbidden is permitted. However, we certainly cannot consider Bitcoin to be a legal currency.” Instead, the Polish government intends to keep an eye on Bitcoin’s development, he said. “We expect [Bitcoin] users to declare whether they want the state to protect and regulate, or to remain uninvolved.”....