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securebulletin.com@Secure Bulletin
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Eric Council Jr., a 26-year-old from Alabama, has been sentenced to 14 months in prison for his role in hacking the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) X account in January 2024. This breach involved a SIM swap attack, a method where a criminal fraudulently induces a cellular phone carrier to reassign a cellular phone number from a victim’s SIM card to a SIM card controlled by the criminal. Council pleaded guilty in February 2025 to conspiracy charges involving aggravated identity theft and access device fraud, and was sentenced on Friday by Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, D.C.
The hack of the SEC's X account was used to post a false announcement about Bitcoin ETF approvals, which had an immediate and significant impact on the cryptocurrency market. Following the false announcement, the price of Bitcoin increased by more than $1,000 per BTC, but after the SEC regained control and confirmed the announcement as unauthorized, the value of BTC decreased by more than $2,000. Council received $50,000 for his participation in the scheme, which involved using a portable ID card printer to create a fraudulent identification card to impersonate a user of a government phone connected to the SEC’s account on X. In addition to the prison sentence, Council faces further penalties including the forfeiture of $50,000 in Bitcoin proceeds and three years of supervised release with restrictions on dark web access and identity fraud. Prosecutors highlighted Council's post-arrest conduct, which included mocking the SEC's cybersecurity measures. The incident underscores critical vulnerabilities in institutional cybersecurity and highlights the need for stricter carrier verification protocols, especially concerning SIM swap risks, and a move away from over-reliance on SMS-based multi-factor authentication.
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@thequantuminsider.com
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Project Eleven has launched the QDay Prize, an open competition offering one Bitcoin, currently valued around $84,000 to $85,000, to anyone who can break elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) using Shor’s algorithm on a quantum computer. This initiative aims to evaluate the proximity of quantum computing to undermining ECC, a widely used encryption scheme. Participants must demonstrate the ability to break ECC using Shor's algorithm, without classical shortcuts or hybrid methods and submissions must include gate-level code and system specifications, all made publicly available for transparency.
The competition is structured around progressively larger ECC key sizes, starting from 1-bit keys, with an emphasis on demonstrating generalizable techniques that can scale to full cryptographic key lengths. The challenge, running until April 5, 2026, seeks to rigorously benchmark the real-world quantum threat to Bitcoin’s core security system. Project Eleven emphasizes that even successful attacks on small keys would be significant milestones, offering valuable insights into the security risks in modern cryptographic systems. Participants can use publicly accessible quantum hardware or private systems, and are expected to handle error-prone qubit environments realistically, given current hardware fidelities. Breaking even a few bits of a private key would be considered a significant achievement, according to Project Eleven. The QDay Prize hopes to establish a verifiable and open marker of when practical quantum attacks against widely used encryption systems may emerge, highlighting the urgency of understanding how close current technologies are to threatening ECC security.
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