[ExI] colonial pipeline shutdown

[Bryan Bishop]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2021 at 10:03 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I didn’t follow this story very closely but what I heard doesn’t make
> sense.
>

They are leaving out information, so the full story is presently
unknowable.


> According to some sources, the FBI managed to get the money back somehow. Are
> there bitcoin hipsters among us who can explain how the FBI could do that?
>

Difficult to say without them releasing more information. Imagine if the
malware had "phoned home" as it were, talking to a remote server under
control of the attackers, and the investigators were able to follow that
trail of evidence. It would be a matter of investigation to follow that
trail and discover that the bitcoin wallet protecting the private keys was
running on a web server connected to the internet, and then they got access
to that server. Criminals are not always sophisticated and they may not
have known that there were more secure ways to store and receive bitcoin.

As another example, consider the Twitter hack:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Twitter_account_hijacking
https://www.wired.com/story/how-alleged-twitter-hackers-got-caught-bitcoin/

Bearer assets are only as secure as how you store them. If you leave a
trail of breadcrumbs to your stash, you should expect attackers to find it
and take it.

- Bryan
https://twitter.com/kanzure
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