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Pi Network Co-Founder Shares Key KYC Updates Pioneers Must Know

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Although it has been around for over half a decade in one form or another, and its Open Network was officially released over a year ago, Pi Network continues to be the center of tons of controversy related to its KYC procedures, as users are quite vocal about their failed migration processes.

Now, though, Dr. Nicolas Kokkalis, one of the project’s co-founders, spoke about some key details, including what could be next for Pi.

Pi’s KYC System

The exec began by explaining that the Pi Network community had “spent years collectively building Pi KYC solution.” They have created a system that allows people from all over the world to interact while keeping their privacy safe, he added. Because Pioneers are located worldwide, the KYC system had to achieve broad geographic coverage and scalability.

In addition to regular identity verification, the solution also integrates sanction screening and compliance checks in a single system. He outlined several reasons why the Core Team had decided to invest “so heavily” into building a robust KYC system:

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“From Pi Network’s perspective, it is foundational to the integrity and authenticity of the network. We also wanted to mitigate the need for Pioneers to pay out of pocket in order to verify their identity and thereby ensure accessibility to the entire community.”

He said the team sees KYC as a critical but unsolved problem in Web3. Consequently, they decided to build their system in-house rather than outsource it.

KYC’s Next Stage

Dr. Kokkalis further explained that the next phases of Pi’s KYC solution would be to treat it as a service, not just an internal system. Now, any transfer of funds or information begs the question of the identities of the sides involved in the move.

Being a project that has internally created its own KYC solution, the co-founder said Pi Network will offer their tech and product (not the data itself) as a service to other projects in Web3 or traditional businesses. He explained that Pi’s KYC approach is distinctive in several ways from other similar solutions:

  • Global coverage
  • Scalabity
  • A hybrid model that combines AI and human verification
  • Completed solution

He said the team is also working on adding additional safety steps, such as fingerprint verifications, to ensure no user information is lost or compromised. Lastly, he believes this step will allow the onboarding of non-Pi users to the Pi Network ecosystem.

The user comments below the official post on X were split on the matter. Some were supportive, indicating that if Pi KYC becomes a “true platform capability, that could be a major step toward real-world utility.” Others continue to be dismissive about Pi’s potential, saying, “What you are doing right now is preventing people who have been mining Pi Coin for 6 years from claiming their Pi coins, out of fear that the price might drop even further.”

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The post Pi Network Co-Founder Shares Key KYC Updates Pioneers Must Know appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Friday’s eth.limo Hijack Caused by Social Engineering on EasyDNS

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Friday’s eth.limo Hijack Caused by Social Engineering on EasyDNS

Ethereum Name Service gateway eth.limo has revealed that the domain hijacking on Friday was caused by a social engineering attack directed against EasyDNS, its domain name service provider. 

According to a postmortem published by eth.limo on Saturday, an attacker impersonated one of its team members to initiate an account recovery process with easyDNS, granting access to the eth.limo account and allowing them to alter domain settings.

“The NS records were changed and directed to Cloudflare… Once we understood that a DNS hijack had taken place, we immediately notified the community as well as Vitalik Buterin and others. We then began contacting EasyDNS in an attempt to respond to the incident,” the company said.

Eth.limo serves as a Web2 bridge, providing access to around 2 million decentralized websites using the .eth domain name. Hijacking the service could allow an attacker to redirect users to malicious websites. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warned users Friday to avoid his blog until the incident was resolved.

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Mark Jeftovic, CEO of easyDNS, has publicly accepted responsibility for the incident in its own postmortem report. 

“We screwed up and we own it,” said Jeftovic on Saturday. 

“This would mark the first successful social engineering attack against an easyDNS client in our 28-year history. There have been countless attempts.”  

Both companies have pointed to the Domain Name System Security Extension (DNSSEC) in thwarting the hacker’s attempts to do further damage. 

The attacker couldn’t produce valid cryptographic signatures, so Domain Name System resolvers rejected the attacker’s forged DNS responses, causing users to see error messages instead of being redirected to malicious sites. 

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“DNSSEC was enabled for their domain when the attackers attempted to flip their nameservers, presumably to effect some manner of phishing or malware injection attack, DNSSEC-aware resolvers, which most are these days, began dropping queries,” Jeftovic said. 

Source: eth.limo

In its postmortem, eth.limo noted that because the attacker lacked the signing keys, they were unable to bypass the safeguards, which likely “reduced the blast radius of the hijack. We are not aware of any user impact at this time. We will provide updates if that changes.”

easyDNS makes changes since the attack

Jeftovic described the social engineering attack as “highly sophisticated,” and said easyDNS is still conducting a post-mortem on how the breach occurred, and has already begun rolling out changes to prevent a recurrence.

Source: easyDNS

“In eth.limo’s case, we will be migrating them to Domainsure, which has a security posture more suited toward enterprise and high-value fintech domains, TLDR there is no mechanism for an account recovery on Domainsure, it’s not a thing,” he added.

“On behalf of everyone here, I apologize to the eth.limo team and the wider Ethereum community. ENS has always had a special place in our heart as the first registrar to enable ENS linking to web2 domains and we’ve been involved in the space since 2017.”

Related: RaveDAO denies manipulation as Binance, Bitget probe RAVE trading activity

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The eth.limo incident is the latest in a series of domain hijackings targeting crypto projects. Days earlier, decentralized exchange aggregator CoW Swap lost control of its website after an unknown party hijacked its domain. 

Steakhouse Financial, a DeFi advisory and research firm, similarly disclosed at the end of March that it had lost control of its domain to an attacker.

Magazine: Will the CLARITY Act be good — or bad — for DeFi?