Phineas Fisher's account of how he took down HackingTeam

Fisher is experienced enough to know any information they leak will be used against them. My guess is that the event is either symbolic or meant build on a persona used to find people like them; post provides a means of contact.

Regardless of their intent, as made clear by my other comment, this was a tragic event, and the police should be held accountable.

Is there some global force that would be active on him?

Presumably, given that they talk about EU culture^W^W^W^W (see comment below) have a https://securityinabox.org/es/… link, the author is from Spain, which would make it easier to pinpoint an origin, as Spain has a wider spectrum of language differences than in most other Spanish-speaking countries.

Since there is a link to http://madrid.cnt.es/, they maybe live in the capital, which weighs 3 million inhabitants.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacking-team-has-lost-its-l...

Quote:

"We can sell everywhere in Europe without a license. We can sell everywhere in the world but we have to ask for a license every time we sell."

I was curious to read this piece to see how closely the approach, techniques and tools he uses compare to how penetration testers are formally trained in the info sec industry. For what it's worth, the methodology in terms of reconnaissance, privilege escalation and lateral movement within the network are typical. Also, most of the tool set he uses (e.g. mimikatz, responder, meterpreter, powersploit, psexec) are part of any good penetration tester's arsenal.

I'm not trying to down play the achievement though. He is clearly very skilled and knowledgeable. Of particular note, it seems that the initial intrusion was only possible because 'after about two weeks of reverse engineering, I discovered a remote root exploit' in an embedded system. He doesn't provide technical details of the exploit but finding a 0-day in an embedded system is usually far from child's play.

Thinking this through- an adversary who's watching the block chain probably knows some inputs and some outputs. As in, these addresses belong to an exchange, these addresses belong to a hosting company.

Okay, fine. Now remember than any user can literally create wallets out of thin air, and in fact doing so is considered basic security hygiene. Let's say Joe User transfers one coin from one wallet to another wallet under their control. Let's say they do this 20 times, sometimes with the full amount, sometimes less.

How does the adversary attach an identity to those transactions?

Telling the blockchain about your bitcoins and their transactions would also leak your IP.

To be anonymous you need to do all transactions from anonymous internet and get all your stuff anonymously.

Perhaps a purchased ebook downloaded from TOR.

You can wash your coins of course, I think it currently requires trust in the company doing it and if not done correctly might still leave a trace.

Of course the real world is different, would the FBI do enormous op sec to catch a small time crook. It's more about risk management.