A private key is not needed if the funds are on an exchange. Apparently there is a warrant to seize property on Northern California so I guess it might be Coinbase.
And yeah... if the crackers sent the funds to an exchange they were comically dumb.
And yeah... if the crackers sent the funds to an exchange they were comically dumb.
It seem more likely that the FBI/NSA had and gained some access to the gang's infrastructure and seized the money.
Transmitting ransom money to an exchange without any type of tumbler or atomic swapping, that it's not a realistic scenario.
Maybe they tried to use an ineffective tumbler?
Why would you assume an attacker uses all of the best cloaking tactics?
This doesn't seem like a complex attack at all: monitor common 0 day vuln feeds, attack, install off the shelf ransomware sold by 5$.
It might as well have been a script kiddie.
Use your head man, this means they literally went to a Federal Judge and said "hey we have probable cause that this address is on Coinbase" and the Judge was like "wow that is pretty probable" and then they took the warrant to Coinbase who was like "oh damn that's legit ..... can we squirm out of dealing with this .... no ... oh wow that is our address too, okay here is the private key" and then the FBI transferred it
No, its not.
Its for a particular Bitcoin address for which the FBI had the primary key. The FBI can’t legally seize coins just because it has a private key any more than it can seize physical property because it has a key to a house. It needs a warrant to use the key, which will only be issued with probable cause that the material is subject to seizure.
> Use your head man, this means they literally went to a Federal Judge and said "hey we have probable cause that this address is on Coinbase"
They literally did not; the warrant and supporting affidavit are public (with some redactions), and that is not, even remotely, what they say.
Not neccessarily.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1402056/downl...
The FBI in Northern California simply needed permission to use the Private Key they already had to access the bitcoin address.
The court that has jurisdiction over these types of crimes is in Northern California.
Maybe not nowadays, but some time ago, after the possibility of tracing transactions was already well known, criminals were still a) first sending all the ransoms they collected directly from the initial ransom address to one address, linking them b) then sending them to their exchange account. No tumbling or obfuscation whatsoever.
for which the FBI has the “private key,” or the rough equivalent of a password needed to access assets accessible from the specific Bitcoin address.
https://www.elliptic.co/hs-fs/hubfs/Screenshot%202021-06-07%...
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/bc1qq2euq8pw950klpjca...