zCash And Its Adoption by Cybercriminals

Until the recent announcement of The Shadowbrokers to use zCash as their new payment vehicle only Cryptotrader and Cryptocurrency enthusiasts have heard of it. Therefore its time to understand what makes it so unique and why we as normal business users, as well as cyber security people, should take a moment and look into what makes zCash so special and why I predict that it will become the new vehicle currency for not only The Shadowbrokers and dark web markets like Alphabay.

Over the last years, we've seen a massive increase in ransomware that encrypted users and businesses desktops, servers and mobile devices asking for a ransom to get the access code or in some cases to not releasing sensitive material on the web.

Back in the days, these encryption Trojans used prepaid cards to get the end users money but when Bitcoin emerged in 2009 quickly cybercriminals all over the world understood the power of it and started leveraging the possibility to anonymously transfer money.

While Bitcoin has served them well in recent times cyber criminals have been facing the disadvantage of Bitcoin that all transactions are public. This allows anyone to monitor any Bitcoin address; seeing the total money ever received, where it came from and where its' been sent to.

This created a problem for groups like The Shadowbrokers. Many exchanges wouldn't accept Bitcoins coming out of certain wallets which got blacklisted by the exchanges. So their money was looked and couldn't be converted to real money.

Just a day before they announced to use zCash instead they emptied their Bitcoin wallet which got immediately picked up by cyber security experts like Mikko Hypponen from F-Secure.

While other people started to monitor where the money went to The Shadowbrokers announced that, for now, they are done with Bitcoin and will test out zCash.

Due to this lack of privacy, not only cyber criminals but many other people seeking more privacy have been looking for alternative cryptocurrencies.

In late 2016 Zooko Wilcox founded and started the zCash blockchain. That follows the same logic Bitcoin is based while adding a second layer to it that allows users to not only send money publicly but also have private transactions which are only visible to the two users that have the keys to the transaction.

Until now there has been no way to look into these transactions which create the advantage for cybercriminals to send money from these private addresses to a public address without anyone being able to see where the money came from.

This means even if we know the private zCash address of The Shadowbrokers we can't monitor it like we could with their Bitcoin address and therefore exchanges can not blacklist this address.

Due to the concept of zCash I have predicted right from the beginning that zCash sooner or later will become the preferred currency used on the dark web as well as for ransom Trojans.

In the end, only time will tell and if The Shadowbrokers are able to raise more zCash then Bitcoin they will definitely lead the world of cyber criminals into a new era where we see them demanding alternative cryptocurrencies.

Finally, I quickly want to add a graph showing the increasing price of zCash since the beginning of this year: