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> Doing it as an insider would be truly insane Why? The concerns (how to steal the money, how to launder/tumble it) seem orthogonal. Random question: is ther

by finnh 5y ago

> Doing it as an insider would be truly insane Why? The concerns (how to steal the money, how to launder/tumble it) seem orthogonal. Random question: is there a statute of limitations on this type of theft? If so, insiders would be highly incented to steal 600M today and then wait X years before using that one-time, anonymous wallet.

carlosdp 5y ago
Because any investigative firm would first look at the very small set of insiders first, and it's harder than one would think to truly hide their tracks, especially since this was a traditional infra attack and not just an on-chain smart contract hack. The fact that the FBI was able to recover the Colonial Pipeline hack funds from the hacker Bitcoin wallet, something that should have been theoretically almost impossible, basically told me that if you steal enough money for the feds to get interested, you better be in a country where they can't get to you.
SkyMarshal 5y ago
It's definitely possible it could have been an insider, but I think it probably wasn't this time. In this case, Occam's Razor suggests an outside job. Reasoning: First, as carlosdp points out, insiders are the first suspect, everyone knows that now, and the FBI has advanced methods of finding them and recovering the funds. There's more deterence factor now. Second, hacking cloud infrastructure for industrial secrets and the like is so common these days, there are tons of black hat hackers and groups around the world that specialize in that. Third, the hack was simple once it was realized that the 5th of 9 signing keys was compromised by the whitelist. Combine that bit of information with #2 and it's essentially a guarantee that someone will make an attempt at it. Fourth, due to war in Ukraine, the world is in an elevated state of cyber warfare now. On top of the usual criminal hackers just looking to steal money, Russian and their allied hackers are seeking ways of stealing money to break sanctions, and/or disrupt financial systems in the West. All this just increases the odds the attack came from outside the org.

by finnh 5y ago

carlosdp 5y ago

Because any investigative firm would first look at the very small set of insiders first, and it's harder than one would think to truly hide their tracks, especially since this was a traditional infra attack and not just an on-chain smart contract hack. The fact that the FBI was able to recover the Colonial Pipeline hack funds from the hacker Bitcoin wallet, something that should have been theoretically almost impossible, basically told me that if you steal enough money for the feds to get interested, you better be in a country where they can't get to you.

SkyMarshal 5y ago

It's definitely possible it could have been an insider, but I think it probably wasn't this time. In this case, Occam's Razor suggests an outside job. Reasoning: First, as carlosdp points out, insiders are the first suspect, everyone knows that now, and the FBI has advanced methods of finding them and recovering the funds. There's more deterence factor now. Second, hacking cloud infrastructure for industrial secrets and the like is so common these days, there are tons of black hat hackers and groups around the world that specialize in that. Third, the hack was simple once it was realized that the 5th of 9 signing keys was compromised by the whitelist. Combine that bit of information with #2 and it's essentially a guarantee that someone will make an attempt at it. Fourth, due to war in Ukraine, the world is in an elevated state of cyber warfare now. On top of the usual criminal hackers just looking to steal money, Russian and their allied hackers are seeking ways of stealing money to break sanctions, and/or disrupt financial systems in the West. All this just increases the odds the attack came from outside the org.