Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said investigators had seized 63.7 Bitcoins paid by Colonial after last month’s hack of its systems that led to massive shortages at US East Coast gas stations.
The fact that investigators “could trace the untraceable and seize it might be undermining the libertarian, free-of-government-control case,” Jeffrey Halley, a senior market analyst at Oanda, told Bloomberg. The implications of that may have provoked the selling, he said.
Good grief, the entire design of the system is that every transaction, every single coin, can be traced from the Year Dot to today. You may not know who owns it but given time and effort every single one can be tracked.
But how did they “seize” those coins? By unblocking the blockchain? Can anyone (any government, at least) do that?
The exact phrase used was “The FBI tracked the payments to a bitcoin wallet for which it happened to have the password”.
How very “convenient”.
My that was quick! Was it found in a wallet that just happened to belong to the FBI? Maybe they’ll get round to their collection of seized computers sometime….Hunter, Weiner?
In the article (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/08/us-recovers-44m-ransom-paid-darkside-colonial-pipeline-hack/ Tim’s link is wrong) it said that the feds had taken over some of the hackers’ infrastructure. Presumably they got the wallet creds out of that.
I just stumbled over this interesting article.
Journalists, being generally morons and incapable if critical analysis swallow the brilliance of Law Enforcement’s cyber abilities, when in fact it is often just a spot of bribing a snout or following the money ( see also the drugs bust story above).
https://dossier.substack.com/p/the-colonial-pipeline-hack-the-russians?r=6a3x3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=twitter