Topic: Cryptios (Read 3147 times)

Official confirmation: alanst is not a member of Cryptios anymore.
FIY: btw, AFAIK former Mysterious newbie™ is a title they added after ranking up from Newbie.

I believe that alanst is no longer part of Cryptios team. I recently noticed something at his profile, where he states now that he is a "Former member of Cryptios". He also changed his Personal Text, which now states "former Mysterious newbie".



I tried to contact alanst a while ago, but he never replied to my PM.

Having that said, I believe we need an official confirmation on this matter, maybe from theymos or Cyrus.

I would be very grateful if you can help with this issue, thank you.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.54701908

Thank you sir. My account was recovered after following those instructions

Hi Andrew, please follow the instructions here please ->https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/recovering-hackedlost-accounts-5089777.

My account was stolen. I locked my account … My thread https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/my-account-was-stolen-i-locked-account-and-need-help-5189319 . Can you help me?

Well, it doesn't cost anything to create Bitcoin wallet. You can continue using Coins.ph, but wallet with option to sign message is must have thing. As Loyce said, you can simply use Bitaddress.org to generate new wallet (it would be best to generate on not connected to internet device). You may not use it as a wallet if you don't want, you can continue using Coins.ph if you want, and use wallet generated on Bitaddress.org just for verification proccess. Just don't forget to keep private keys in safe place.
And if you don't want to download any wallet or buy hardware wallet (what I would recommend to do), you can import this wallet to Blockchain.com and sign message there.

With a coins' address there's no way to give out proofs except sending exact amounts to an address but since you have a MEW you could use that to sign a message.

Just make sure to stake/post it somewhere in the forum and have an archive of it(or let someone quote it) in case the post gets edited by the hacker.  

Also I recommend doing what is suggested by LoyceV, it doesn't hurt to create a wallet specifically for this reason.

I think it's time for you to become a real Bitcoin user Get a wallet that gives you access to your private keys, and don't rely on third parties to hold your Bitcoin.
Then, post a Bitcoin address in Stake your Bitcoin address here, so you can use it to prove ownership at the time you post that. An older post is of course better, but if you don't have that yet, now is the best time to make one.

If you really don't want to create a wallet, get a Bitcoin address from bitaddress.org: click Paper Wallet, print it, keep your copy safe, and post the address in the thread I mentioned above. If it ever comes to it, you can use it to prove ownership.

Pray to what ever you believe in that you have a PGP key staked somewhere. Otherwise i don't see how you can claim the account is yours.

Or the admin must really go out of bounds to let you for example send a small amount of coins from an adress that you posted somewhere on the forum eg; for a bounty/signature campaign.
I don't think they do that though. I believe that in the past, if you didn't stake an adress, you were simply out of luck, and your account is/was unrecoverable.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/recovering-hackedlost-accounts-5089777

Admin...

Just a question,... If, only if our accounts has been compromised and locked.
What would be the possible steps that we should follow for those users (like me) who have BTC Addresses that can't be signed a Message?
Been using Coins.PH for a long time, and the fact that hackers are way too active right now,I think this steps that you'll provide should be necessary...

P.S. I have MEW but as for it is a GENERALTHING for not all of us does use other addresses, I would like you to take this into consideration... TIA

Replied in your thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.51854980

Hi,

My account "kenzawak" got hacked again.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/account-kenzawak-compromised-again-5165936

I don't have access to it anymore. Same thing with my email address.

Can you lock it please ?

Thank you for your suggestion! At the time of this specific recovery, such a line wasn't actually added to the template, however, we have since started including a "warning" advising to review the post history and delete all of the posts made after the hack in order to prevent the account from being banned for potential spam/plagiarism

Also, this case is currently under review, no further bumps required!

Just a suggestion here, for when you recover a hacked account for someone. Can you please inform them they should delete that accounts posts from the time of the hack. It seems there has been the odd case where a user has had their account returned and then carries on in blissful ignorance until one of the hackers posts gets them into trouble. This could be simply an add-on to the email or whatever recovery message you send. Sorry if you already do this and they just ignore it.

Here is the case that made me think of it this morning. AlexRus227

Once Satoshi's ultimate plan is fulfilled, all will join me in abandoning the weakness of flesh.     


That wouldn't eliminate the need for manual recoveries; it might even increase it as people lose their second factor. 2FA would be nice, but IMO the email notifications provide many of the same benefits, so it's not high on my to-do list.

Since the entire discussion is because my account got locked, even i was baffled on what the situation was, i was thinking i started a thread against CZ and his stupid claims on being safe even when his system could not identify a huge hack when some hackers could withdraw 7000 bitcoin and portraying as it was nothing and talking about roll back which was silly, i was having second thoughts until i found that thread that i merited some user who posted something which made me laugh and i took a day to understand the new merit system and other changes and i was checking that out in the first place by giving him a merit simply because the sentiment i had with the entire hack was correlating to my sentiment on a funny way.
I have seen many accounts being locked out and never had the opportunity to recover because of hacks in the past but locking accounts simply because of suspicion is a bit too much in my opinion, yes they unlocked it within a day and i appreciate that.

My suggestion would be to monitor the accounts that deal with loan or money related stuff and if you find it suspicious and i have seen a lot of scams in this forum and i am sick of it, either in the form of scam ICO or other wise, there is nothing wrong to lock it, if not it is a mundane approach.

In reality the evidence presented by bitcoin_arena is pretty flimsy.  I would feel better about this situation if @alanst had shown some restraint and researched the situation more thoroughly before locking the account.

@alanst, no offence meant, please don't take this the wrong way.  I wouldn't want my account locked, and like suchmoon I'm guilty of three of the four red-flags.  As for the fourth; all it takes is a couple of drinks and I'll start posting nonsense.  

I don't understand the rush with locking the account: if it was hacked 2 years ago, a day more or less isn't going to matter. So that gives enough time to investigate first and lock later if needed.

Could learn a lot from the LoyceV model, barely gives itself away anymore. 

---

I thought I would point out that, the Locked account previously discussed was unlocked and for the user it was a rather painless experience. I'm still not on board with the idea of preemptively locking accounts, even if it is few and far between, but it appears to be something that is handled quickly. I am curious though if this happened over a weekend would someone get the same rapid support?

Not sure why I found the use of the word "humans" in that sentence so funny. Only something non-human would refer to others as "the humans". I think the autonomous theymos AI needs more training data to better blend in with us lowly humans and avoid subtly revealing its true nature.

@theymos, couldn't a lot of this be avoided if we had a 2FA system in place?  I know you don't want to use the google system, and I don't blame you, but what about a decentralized system like using a PGP public key to generate single-use passwords, and send PGP encrypted password recovery links to the registered email?

I know we've discussed this numerous times, and it's always been shutdown.  Forgive me if I'm beating a dead horse, but I think I would rather live the downsides of a 2FA system opposed to the downsides of farming out account recovery.

Yes, I believe if you send them an e-mail from the e-mail that you used to create the account, that would be proof. You can also stake a bitcoin address on this thread https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/stake-your-bitcoin-address-here-996318. Basically you sign a message with a bitcoin address that you control and in the future, you can sign another message using this same Bitcoin address. For privacy, use an address that you have not used and will not use for  BTC payments.

Good, personally I don't have a problem with "mysterious newbies" having access to see my IP address, they probably need it "when handling the new account recoveries system". As for my own understanding, if my account locked from being "suspected to be compromised" do I only need to send them an email which I used on my account and "provide some evidence that I owned that email, that would unlock my account right?

he can see it

Boss, can You also see what they are doing or they gave you that info?

The account was security-locked, not "banned for sending stupid merit". The user would see a message saying "Your account is locked because it is suspected to be compromised, email ...". Then if they email and provide some evidence that it's not compromised, it'd be unlocked.

Locking without a recovery email can be appropriate in cases similar to this where the user woke up, their access had suspicious characteristics, and they immediately started doing suspicious things. If their access characteristics change from one week to the next, without a long period of inactivity, then I'd be more likely to assume by default that they're using someone else's computer or they sold their account (which is allowed), and I'd rely on a complaint email to move from this default assumption.

Cryptios's main purpose is recovering accounts, but they can also do minor patroller-type things. They are neither admins nor global moderators. They have access to IP/security logs (not PMs), but each of their accesses to private info are logged and per-day-limited; even if their access was compromised, the damage would be limited. In the past 7 days, they viewed the basic info/logs of 461 users and viewed the IP logs of 51 users.

Which part, the locking or me being erratic? The latter is very likely


Fair enough. But I'm quite certain I've done at least 3 out of 4 red flags (password change, e-mail change, IP/browser change, and atypical posting) at once and it's not a huge stretch to imagine all 4 happening - e.g. e-mail provider has a problem so I change my e-mail and password, maybe log in from a fresh device to verify... then go to WO to relieve the stress with rocket memes. Would be nice to not get locked preemptively.

Well I just witnessed an account being locked just by over sending 1 merit to a worthless post along with some telltale signs like email being change, IP changes, and posting habits by one of the employees of the company. And just by the looks of how quick they decide to lock an account I think they should be moderated as well on this matter.


I don't like the idea that one day I have changed my email, travel to another country, or somehow have a different posting habit that week and suddenly find out that my own account got locked and now I need to prove my ownership with it (How will they or I even prove it?). It just gives me a state of unrest knowing that I can wrongly be suspended in the future. Well this is just my two cents on the matter before things gets out of hand.

That sounds unlikely to happen. If the password would be changed as well, being hacked would be more plausible (Occam's razor). However, even in this made-up scenario of yours, I would be very careful how/if to proceed (especially since I could risk tipping off a hacker on how to hide their tracks by giving away too many details).

The seclog shows manual recoveries and I feel a bit better knowing that users check it often.

We have tiered access, on a need-to-know basis. There have also been recent changes on how data is being handled by the forum, you can check it here: https://bitcointalk.org/privacy.php

No.

As I said, there have been no changes in the public forum policy. As always, account sales are not against the rules but they' not enouraged either. There's no random account locks going on.

I feel uneasy too!

I don't think there is any moderation issue even if accounts change hands, until it's proven to be hacked by the original owner. (IPs and email changes does not prove that the account is hacked it rather could be sold)

Also, if the original owner is concerned about his account being hacked, he could personally lock it through the email.

I don't want to sound bad, but atleast a clarification about how does the process go would help, so that everyone could protect there accounts from being locked without a warning.

everyone has access to our PMs because we use cloudflair now

Can we have a list of all the forum features to which the mysterious newbies have access?

Sounds like they have access to IPs and old sec/mod logs, do they have access to PMs?

How many Cryptios employees can see the IP address(es) of forum users?

Does Cryptios have any thread with regards to their account recovery or sort of a list for their attempts here in the forum? If they don't have one yet I think they should because it would be great to see how they have successfully (or fail) on every account they try to to recover. Another thing is that it will be an added transparency other forum members will be interested to see.

I feel seriously uneasy about this and I don't think it's the burrito. So let's say if I change my e-mail address, get a new Tor circuit, and want to entertain my Russian friends with the help of Google Translate, will my account get locked because someone felt like it? I mean I get the "private forum so you got no rights here" vibe but it always used to err on the side of all kinds of shit being allowed. And I can live with the consequences of fucking something up myself but this "help with moderation" sounds a bit too nebulous.

If we're running out of things to do with the IP addresses and whatnot may I suggest to crack down on ban evasions instead.

Thanks for clarifying, I wasn't aware there was also a moderation aspect involved; apart from obviously anything you chose to do being Admin.

I can see some accounts causing worries and possibly warranting a preemptive lock for safety/security; such as Mods, Merit sources, "forum trusted escrow" etc. Again I don't see what you guys see, I'm just wondering what they would need to do in this case. Perhaps they bought the account - not that I encourage this - what would they have to post to regain the account.

I definitely understand needing the ability to lock accounts once the recovery process is started. It just seemed a slippery slope to me in this instance before anyone involved or potentially involved with the account raised a concern. As you said though you've been doing this for a while, I only noticed this as it was stated in the thread.

Thanks again for taking the time to clarify the role and stance of Cryptios

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/this-guy-is-asking-for-merit-which-should-be-earned-and-not-asked-5140656

I would suggest that theymos review the above thread and manage expectations as to when actions should be taken, and when/what information should be disclosed publicly. ETA/ (and when information should be accessed)

Cryptios also helps out with some basic moderation.
There is no change in forum policy.
Regarding the post above: In the years I've handled recoveries I've came across quite a few similar cases where the account was compromised with a fair degree of certainty and it was safer for everyone that the account be locked until it was claimed. In this case we temporarily locked it to check if anyone claimed it. It's worth noting that not all the accounts that people are trying to recover are locked to begin with. So we need to be able to lock them until the recovery process is completed.

I came across something today, and I'd like to get further clarification on a couple of things.

1) Scope of the service Cryptios is offering to the forum. I was under the impression it was solely for account recoveries.
2) Forum policy regarding Locking accounts suspected to have been hacked, sold or otherwise changed hands.

I'm concerned about action being taken without the account recovery process being started by anyone claiming ownership of the account. I've quoted the post below, I can understand the reasoning behind taking action; if forum policies have changed. Currently though this seems to be an overreach, and has the potential to lock peoples accounts unnecessarily. I don't think an account should be locked without the recovery process being started.

I wish you good luck with your business, but you guys might want to take a look at your auto-generated (?) Terms of Service.

Great to see this group in action ...

Cyrus - you are theMAN

#crysx

Cryptios team are not forum moderators -exept for cyrus- and only provide services of recovery for the Bitcointalk forum and can offer the same services or more to other clients. This is what I also understand.

With Cyrus as a team member and forum moderator, Cryptios should have the power to lock suspecious accounts.
I recently recovered my account after six months of inactivity, the process was great fast and smooth. I think they can lock/unlock accounts.

You have put the specialties of the company, and that they are taking care of the recovery of the accounts. But it was not clear, at least for me, what other services they are providing to the forum. Is it possible to list all the services they are providing? Is there any possibility of them not only recovering accounts but stopping accounts that were hacked before the legitimate owners complained?

BTW If Cryptios are planning to do a local moderation too and you guys need someone with Bulgarian, I'm always availabe
I can give a hand with Norwegian too, but often Norwegian comes together with Danish and Sweedish ( Scandinavian in general) and there i a bit of a fuss for me.

Moderation has not been outsourced.

So the moderation is now completely outsourced??
I read the website mentioned in OP, it does not expose the clients it give service to. Is bitcointalk the first and only??

Mhhhh... made me think. Maybe we should outsource moderating completely, because this is essentially what this is.
Do you think there is room for another competitor? 

Nice to have you guys and see some new helping hands in here ! 

Keep up the good work and job  !   

Hey there guys 


I was actually at a loss for words after reading the thread and seeing the feedback from all of you. Have to give a sincere "Thank you " . Really feeling pumped up.

Happy posting everyone and see you around 

 🐱 Now only this guy 👉 Rizzrack is being left out without a word by his team mates could he be shy at the moment? I wonder how full is the workloads of you guys while doing some ninja skills of disguise. You have completely fooled us for being a Lucky Copper Member for having those avatars.

Now, if we're able to see such users the same as yours then an answer falls respectively on being an employee here 😂 Good Day Fellas!

Thank you guys for what you're doing! Hacked accounts was one of the biggest problems on Bitcointalk, it's great to see how things changed in recent months. People finally got chance to get their accounts back. And numbers of recovered accounts looks impressive. Offcourse, I guess there is still lot of work to do.
About this mystery, I had prediction in my mind that Copper Membership with special perks was awarded by admins, but I had no idea why these users are so special. Now it's clear, thank you theymos for this announcement.

(Good project sir! I really believe this project is great and it will go to the moon sir! Any bounty or airdrop?
#Joined
Username: LeGaulois)

Seriously, Good luck to @Cyrus and people working with. Nice to see it creates employment , I wish you can extend your activity to other customers, and why not ending like IDNow (not sure if the company name is correct)

I can scrape (most of) them from BPIP.org if you get me a list, I have a script ready for it.

I have mostly usernames, but I’ll try and include the profile links to what I have as well. Will let you both know when it’s done.

Yes it is helpful to do so. I will add them to my records and display them publicly for future reference.
LoyceV is professional in working with data, but I would ask you to compile the list for me in the clearest possible way.

I think it's very important to show those unlocked accounts and if Theymos can add the new accounts (to be unlocked) to the SecLog so you won't have to record them separately.

I'm assuming that this is paid work are you directly paid via the forum for moderation work too? We definitely need more moderators in the Bitcoin Discussion and other threads in the main Bitcoin area. Its interesting that the amount of accounts that have been recovered is so high but I'm interested in how many have been attempted but rejected for any reason?

Please do so If you can show only the userIDs, I'll make a complete list out of it.

Considering there's a company with 3 employees working on it, I'm curious how much it costs per recovered account.

I feel like all the fourm money that is spent is 100% transparent in where it goes. How much is the fourm paying for cryptios? If its not transparent, its gotta be pretty close right. 

Nice to see some guys working and also take care of the forum !
Is definitely also a big support for theymos and Cyrus and the moderators !

Hi guys, thank you all for the kind words, see you around, officially from now on 


That's ok, the community needs this type of members like you


Don't bother, it's just edited in Paint 

We have a special sort of Copper membership apparently 

Still, I am not clear if you are only the part of account recovery team only. I guess , we saw you moving threads also.

I will also like to quote one of the edited image by 3doom.


"Whitelist" and "Nuke" are also not the perks of Copper Membership

We've replied to more than 2000 requests since the service was introduced in late December besides the 112 that were queued for recovery and are shown in the seclog. There are also hundreds of accounts that were locked in 2015 and 2017 that needed to be unlocked without having to go through reverting the email which are not being quantified in the seclog.

Huge thanks to Kavelj22 for gathering and archiving the "All the Ownership-Changed and Restored accounts" accounts. Would it help if I compiled a list with those accounts that were unlocked but are not shown in the seclog?

In fact, i found it a little bit weird that Theymos is manually working on accounts recovery without help. Nice to see Theymos hiring music-fans to do this heavy complicated task (accounts recovery) : 

Am already recording information about the recovered profiles (except for newbies) according to SecLog data ;  All the Ownership-Changed and Restored accounts.
112 profiles have been recovered during the last 4 months.

Thank you Theymos for clearing this, I want also to give thanks to the team behind Cryptios.

Well played man! It was really funny from our side to see everyone struggle with it, we were wondering if anyone would get to the bottom of it and you were the closest. To the moon! 

@alanst @3dOOm
Sorry guys if I bothered you with those PMs asking for answers, it was a really puzzling for me when I first saw your accounts.
I knew that you are somehow related to Cyrus. Anyway you are doing great work so keep it up, I just love to be part of all this
Good luck to this project

Our online presence is still a work in progress, that's the reason why the website isn't fully "functional" yet, however, it's a starting point and we're glad that the overall impact is a positive one

Same here.

I think the website is not updated fully yet. Also, there does not seems any social media profiles created until for the company.

Thanks for clear another mysterious, they are doing great job by recovering account.
Thanks buddy to help people's who are waiting from long time to recover their account. Glad to see that you are a part of account recovery team. You are doing best and hope it will be continue.

https://cryptios.com/clients/payment-area/
am on this page and can't click back on any of the links.
was looking to see if you take Grin for payment...

nice work, though, altogether!

Hi everyone and thank you for your kind words! Sorry for not being able to tell you the real reason why we were wearing avatars, truth is, we didn’t realize it wasn’t a Copper membership “perk” until you guys did...

That being said, we’re happy to be part of this wonderfull community and, hopefully we’ll be able to help make it a bit better if possible.

P.S. Kudos to iasenko for his spot on detective work and to everyone else who “almost” nailed it keep up the good detective work, it's also helping us more than you know!

There is no way to deny that current account recovery system has erased so many concerns from users mind. I want to give thanks to cyrus and his team for helping community users by providing this system. Hope to see more creative updates on this forum in the near future.

It's awesome to the team on board, I did notice that account recoveries were no moving much faster and there are not some many people complaining in meta about how their accounts have taken many months without being recovered like they used to do about 6 months back.
Great job to Cyrus and Co.

That is a great news for many people who lost their accounts and want to recover it faster than before. A dedicated company for account recovery looks like an better approach for sure.


Thank you for clearing this, I think Me and many more users here had doubts about that profiles regarding them being newbie and wearing avatars (also the profiles were created recently).

[BUG?]Theymos, can you solve the mystery? newbies with 2 merit watering avatar?

Thanks for clearing about the status of these newbies.


Best of luck Cyrus for your new endeavour.

So in reality it was your team that was working for account recovery when we thought theymos is doing it manually 

Would you consider directing them to provide a (limited use) captcha link to someone who can provide similar information that would be required to reset their password (or perhaps needing to provide slightly less information).

The reason for this would be to allow someone who knows their password to access their account if they are having problems with the google captcha

Thank you theymos for the announcement and the kind words!

FYI: The humans handling the new account recoveries system which was implemented late last year are a company that Cyrus created called Cryptios. alanst, 3dOOm, and Rizzrack -- the "mysterious newbies" who some people noticed -- are three of their employees. They've been doing a great job.

Although Cyrus created the company with bitcointalk.org in mind as their first customer, they are accepting additional customers. Their main specialization right now is high-security, social-engineering-proof customer support & community moderation.