Topic: [2017-05-19] Cybercrooks Look For Bitcoin Alternative (Read 7703 times)

It's obvious that you don't understand the main point of importance here. If the hackers run 'their' stolen coins through a mixer, they risk having 'their' coins seized immediately after the first confirmation. It basically goes up for every service (.e.g. gambling site, exchange, spending them through well known Bitcoin payment processors, etc) you plan to use - the risk of having these coins seized is larger than them "cleanly" coming back to you. It cost no effort to trace every movement of these coins, and seize them after their first confirmation if they happen to get deposited somewhere.

quite sure all major bitcoin mixers are working with the law enforcement very very closely
so mixing the tainted coins is not the perfect solution
and how on earth tainted bitcoins are worthless? you can spend them for goods any day

Those bitcoins aren't worthless. You just have to run them through a mixer (like the one advertised in your signature) or a tumbler.
For a small fee, you get anonymized units of the world's numero uno cryptocurrency.

The level of anonymity is still decent with Bitcoin. You take a clean pc, install a wallet and connect through one of the free wifi points around town or hack someone's password and you have an untraceable wallet. If you get a transaction you can then convert it to any altcoin you like and divide between multiple small addresses. Good luck with tracing that.

The last wave of attacks, instead of demanding ransom, used the computers to mine Monero. Use Monero for ransom still is for the future.

But it is simple to have Monero or most coins if one has Bitcoins, just use Shapeshift.io. The hackers could give instructions about how to do it, or implement it in the ransom program, wouldn't be difficult at all. Ethereum wallet already does it, you send them some Bitcoins, they convert to Ethereum

People should actually leave these idiots who thinks Bitcoin is ideal for their crimes. They should even encourage it, to give the law enforcement

agencies more data to work with to catch them. This is how law enforcement agencies pinpointed the people behind these attacks... they think

they are clever, but they only give these agencies more rope to hang themselves. 

It's nice to see comments from tech experts like citing in the article.

Although I think that little helps to oppose prevailing negative opinion about bitcoin in mainstream media. Top news media like Reuters often blame bitcoin in every sin of a human not even get into details. Sometimes it looks like a well orchestrated campaign to blacken the very idea.

I am sure that people being desperate enough to actually pay ransom, will have no problems into taking an extra stap as in buying Bitcoin first, and then convert it to Monero. I haven't really looked in dept into the anonymity aspect of certain altcoins, but if they are really as anonymous as the developers state them to be, then these criminals might actually go for it. Because as it is right now, the collected ransom Bitcoins are pretty much worthless as basically everyone can follow these coins step by step. They have to come up with something new.

The average Joe on the street had to find out how to buy bitcoins to pay the ransom. If ransomware start asking for Monero as ransom, people will just scratch their heads and move on. It will be a long time before any other cryptocurrency comes close to Bitcoin.

wannacry not make bitcoin fail and great great again 

While bitcoin has enabled criminals to move their activities online, notably the ransom payment of choice for last weekend’s WannaCry malware incident, those well-versed in the cryptocurrency space know that bitcoin, while hard to track, is far from completely anonymous.

All bitcoin transactions by design are recorded in a permanent public ledger accessible to anyone. Users can be traced through IP addresses as well as by analyzing money flows.

A new report from Reuters suggests that bitcoin’s dominance in the dark corners of the web has lasted as long as it has, despite the number of extra steps required to ensure anonymity, is mostly related to its size and circulation volume.

“In the initial days of bitcoin, people … didn’t realize they were recording for posterity on the blockchain every financial transaction that ever took place,” Emin Gun Sirer, a computer science professor at Cornell University, told the newswire.

A single bitcoin payment is enough to expose user identities and transaction histories. While bitcoin’s lack of total anonymity may not be a major issue for regulators, banks and proponents of its underlying blockchain tech, it could still put a dent in its overall use by cybercriminals who want to keep transactions private.

Especially since there are a number of digital currencies with actual anonymity built in — including Z-Cash, along with Dash and Monero. For now, these cryptocurrencies are much more difficult to access, acquire and exchange for fiat than bitcoin.

But it turns out, experts reported earlier this week that a computer virus, exploiting the same vulnerability as the WannaCry attack, had infected over 200,000 computers. Instead of demanding ransom, this virus used the computers to begin mining Monero — similar to bitcoin-based viruses released in bitcoin’s early days.

This is reportedly leading some to believe that, if Monero moves to become as adopted and accessible as bitcoin, cybercriminals would turn to this cryptocurrency for the purpose of cyberextortion.

“This used to happen in bitcoin before it became big — there were loads of botnets that went into computers that used to mine bitcoin, but you now can’t basically mine bitcoin on normal computers because you need specialist hardware,” Chainalysis CEO Jonathan Levin told Reuters. “If Monero does become adopted and is as big and liquid [as bitcoin], that means the crime [will] move from using computers to mine to getting to extortion,” Levin said.

http://www.pymnts.com/news/bitcoin-tracker/2017/cybercrooks-look-for-bitcoin-alternative/