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Comment by dtx1 | Hacker News Reader

How did they crack the Laptop? Just Bruteforcing a bad password or 0Day-ing the Encryption?

I'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.

They created a GUI in VB and tracked the IP address.

Works every time!

Supposedly 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.

I 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.

The thing is, if you enable hard drive encryption (BitLocker in Windows?), resetting the password means that you lose access to the encrypted bits.

Maybe 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.

I think this is the $137 million dollar question.

So they thought. Turns out it was worth nothing.

>>I think this is the $137 million dollar question.

Minus the laundering fees...let's be fair ;)

Based 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.

TFA 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.

Applying a zero-day exploit without making it public doesn't burn anything. After all, no one knows how they did it.

But would they even risk raising suspicion?

I'm confused why anyone in this thread chain would think a firm like Ernst and Young would have access to zero-days?

0days 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.

Ernst 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.

Because 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.

Why 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.

they probably do this every day. At this level, it would have needed to be packaged similar to the way the NSA tools were.

A package of tools that comes on a hardened usb key, just plug it in in the field and it runs through the 0days that it knows about.

If fees were x and the bought exploit cost a lot less, why not?

Then 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%20Fin...

> the NSA and other white-hat organizations

First time I hear NSA grouped with white-hats. What definition would permit this categorization?

The 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#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]

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