7 ms·
How did they crack the Laptop? Just Bruteforcing a bad password or 0Day-ing the Encryption?
by dtx1 8y ago
How did they crack the Laptop? Just Bruteforcing a bad password or 0Day-ing the Encryption?
- omouse 8y agoI think this is the $137 million dollar question.
- emilsedgh 8y agoSo they thought. Turns out it was worth nothing.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago>>I think this is the $137 million dollar question. Minus the laundering fees...let's be fair ;)
- Ascetik 8y agoBased on what I've read, the NSA and other white-hat organizations have access to 0-days or have discovered 0-days that can crack these things but they're not released to the public or if they are, they're released years later.
- msherry 8y agoTFA says that Ernst and Young was the company to crack the laptop. Ernst and Young would not burn a zero-day exploit on an auditing job.
- bootloop 8y agoApplying a zero-day exploit without making it public doesn't burn anything. After all, no one knows how they did it.
- solarkraft 8y agoBut would they even risk raising suspicion?
- gph 8y agoI'm confused why anyone in this thread chain would think a firm like Ernst and Young would have access to zero-days?
- g45y45 8y ago0days are not magic. Stare enough at code and you will find them. E&Y and the other Professional Services companies have a big pentesting team, and they would have made discoveries on their own regarding system security. Any company with a large security / research team would have 0days. What they do with them, (report, sit, burn, etc) is up the organizational and individual ethics of the operator.
- dagw 8y agoErnst and Young are huge and do a lot of very sophisticated forensic accounting work. If they don't have people in house, they almost certainly have the phone number to someone who does.
- barkingcat 8y agoBecause 0-days are accessible to anyone with money. And Ernst and Young would have a ton of money, and plenty of opportunities where clients would come to them and hire them privately about issues like this. Coming up with 0-days is moderately hard with your own cracking team. Buying them is an easy thing to do. Ultimately, that's what 0-days are for in the wider market. You find one and sell it.
- stordoff 8y agoWhy would it? If no one else knows the password, just say it was a weak password (or even that you got lucky). There's $137m missing, so clearly something went wrong - one more mistake wouldn't be hard to believe. Even if it does, does it matter? "There's a vulnerability in <OS>" is not exactly news or useful.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoIf fees were x and the bought exploit cost a lot less, why not?
- Scoundreller 8y agoThen TFA was wrong. E&Y’s own reports say that it was the Applicant’s own “expert” that tried to break in. The applicant is the founder’s widow. The expert doesn’t seem to have much of a specialization for breaking into computers. Who knows what kind of mess he caused. S. 12 https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fintech%20Solutions%20Corp/English/1.%20Monitor%27s%20Reports/4.%20Third%20Report%20of%20the%20Monitor/Third%20Report%20of%20the%20Monitor%20dated%20March%201,%202019.pdf https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fin...
- lolc 8y ago> the NSA and other white-hat organizations First time I hear NSA grouped with white-hats. What definition would permit this categorization?
- sterlind 8y agoThe NSA wears two hats, one for each head. [0] The white hat secures government communication, prevents industrial espionage, hardens national infrastructure and collaborates on FIPS and other standards. The black hat eavesdrops on foreign government communication, conducts mass surveillance, hacks national infrastructure and backdoors FIPS and other standards. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#Mission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#Missi... NSA's eavesdropping mission includes radio broadcasting, both from various organizations and individuals, the Internet, telephone calls, and other intercepted forms of communication. Its secure communications mission includes military, diplomatic, and all other sensitive, confidential or secret government communications.[51]
- conception 8y agoI'm guessing they brute forced into his laptop (or used a windows exploit or something) and opened up the program to find the cold wallet addresses (which is amazing they didn't have elsewhere) and then found them to be empty. Even if they didn't have the private keys, they'd just need the address to discover the balance. Though, the keys were also probably on the laptop.
- Scoundreller 8y agoSupposedly it was done by an ex-police officer that doesn’t seem to have a particular specialization in the subject. They were of the founder’s wife’s choosing. Quite possibly they did more harm than good.
- jtr_47 8y agoMaybe there's an exploit with the hardware or operating system that is not known to the standard population, but is known by the government, hardware/OS manufacturer and black hat/white hat crackers.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoI don’t know about now, but in the past accessing an account was as easy as resetting the password in safe mode. I have done this numerous times when I worked in IT for people who forgot their passwords. It was such a stupid simple workaround. It wouldn’t surprise me if such workarounds still exist in win 10 and previous.
- short_sells_poo 8y agoThe thing is, if you enable hard drive encryption (BitLocker in Windows?), resetting the password means that you lose access to the encrypted bits.
- mv4 8y agoThey created a GUI in VB and tracked the IP address.
- jeffbarr 8y agoWorks every time!