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Topic: More than 50% of bitcoins from Twitter hack have been sent through mixers - page 2. (Read 921 times)

jr. member
Activity: 41
Merit: 4
jesus Christ... it's not the first time when I'm hearing this.. and as I can see it's those kinda things often happen to twitter security... sad to hear

I always found it funny how they were trying to frame it as a bitcoin hack, when it absolutely wasn't. But I guess twitter needs to "step up" and defend their own when they screw up this big and btc was a good fall guy. Though anyone with any semblance of understanding of bitcoin could see through their bullshit.

Guess it's worth because there's still lots of cryptoheads that use twitter as a main source of news in the space. Oh well
legendary
Activity: 3178
Merit: 1140
#SWGT CERTIK Audited
The hacked money relied in known addresses, once a transaction was made from those addresses it should be blocked and the money seized (corporation with law agencies ofc).
Then you have to introduce a trusted third party who will investigate and approve or deny requests for various addresses to be blacklisted, which essentially makes your mixer no better than a centralized exchange.

Now the hackers could send the money to intermediate addresses then to mixers. I am not very familiar with programming but normally it is not hard I suppose to implant a program that check if a hacked BTC address was connected to a new one being used, or maybe an alert system to inform those services that the funds are being moved from a known hacked address.
And in this scenario, you will be punishing users like me who like to trade peer-to-peer. If I buy some bitcoin and am unaware it is related to a hack, as soon as I try to mix it (as I do with most of my bitcoin), it's going to be confiscated from me even although I have done nothing wrong.
Well involving a third party isn't a must, I add some suggestions that doesn't necessarily involve it. They can build their own program, an alert system doesn't have to access data, neither the manual option should be a problem.
For the scenario you mentioned, yes it can cause many problems. What I suggested is for huge and "famous" hack involving mainly exchanges...and another example is what happened to twitter. I don't see how could a normal user addresses be linked to the hackers.
I understand your concern but mixers should protect itself and its legitimate users. I assimilate it to a small exchange service that you can find in the street, taking $ from thieves that just stole the bank and giving them back $ with other serial numbers. That service risks to be seized and followed in justice...Just improve yourself and verify the codes when you hear that the bank near you has been just stolen!
I hope you understand what I mean  Wink
newbie
Activity: 1
Merit: 0
jesus Christ... it's not the first time when I'm hearing this.. and as I can see it's those kinda things often happen to twitter security... sad to hear
legendary
Activity: 2268
Merit: 18775
The hacked money relied in known addresses, once a transaction was made from those addresses it should be blocked and the money seized (corporation with law agencies ofc).
Then you have to introduce a trusted third party who will investigate and approve or deny requests for various addresses to be blacklisted, which essentially makes your mixer no better than a centralized exchange.

Now the hackers could send the money to intermediate addresses then to mixers. I am not very familiar with programming but normally it is not hard I suppose to implant a program that check if a hacked BTC address was connected to a new one being used, or maybe an alert system to inform those services that the funds are being moved from a known hacked address.
And in this scenario, you will be punishing users like me who like to trade peer-to-peer. If I buy some bitcoin and am unaware it is related to a hack, as soon as I try to mix it (as I do with most of my bitcoin), it's going to be confiscated from me even although I have done nothing wrong.
legendary
Activity: 3178
Merit: 1140
#SWGT CERTIK Audited
But i preferred to see some serious monitoring of the addresses containing the hacked money and freeze them once the money was sent...
As I asked of someone else higher up in this thread, how could this work? As soon as a mixer starts investigating where coins are coming from, where they are going, and keeping logs joining deposits and withdrawals together, then they have defeated their very purpose and no sensible person would touch them.

It would be like trying to making every Tor node monitor all the traffic that passes through them and only allow what is deemed "acceptable". It defeats the very purpose of a privacy enhancing service if a third party can monitor and censor you at any time.
No no, I did not mean to monitor every single transactions made.
The hacked money relied in known addresses, once a transaction was made from those addresses it should be blocked and the money seized (corporation with law agencies ofc).
Now the hackers could send the money to intermediate addresses then to mixers. I am not very familiar with programming but normally it is not hard I suppose to implant a program that check if a hacked BTC address was connected to a new one being used, or maybe an alert system to inform those services that the funds are being moved from a known hacked address.
The worst scenario is to monitor those addresses manually whenever a new block is issued...
full member
Activity: 966
Merit: 102
It is the simplest way to maintain ownership of their stolen bitcoins cheaply and securely after using a mixer. Although governments have banned the use of anonymous money and spoke out about mixer mines for security and privacy, the mixer is a feature that makes bitcoin a good anonymity.
In the post only mentioning that more than 50% is sent through the mixer then I think the amount of bitcoins put into the mixer is very low. I wonder if the amount of money they have left is left in an old address or for public use.
sr. member
Activity: 1876
Merit: 318
If you look at the data in the opening post, I am even more sure that Bitcoin from Twitter hack was indeed sent via mixers.
But this cannot be concluded that mixing services is bad, because it depends on the user. Mixing services for me provides
the privacy I need for avoid being targeted by hackers. But at least I understand why some people accuse Bitcoin mixers of
being used for money laundering, because the twitter hack that uses mixing services makes their reputation become bad.
legendary
Activity: 2268
Merit: 18775
But i preferred to see some serious monitoring of the addresses containing the hacked money and freeze them once the money was sent...
As I asked of someone else higher up in this thread, how could this work? As soon as a mixer starts investigating where coins are coming from, where they are going, and keeping logs joining deposits and withdrawals together, then they have defeated their very purpose and no sensible person would touch them.

It would be like trying to making every Tor node monitor all the traffic that passes through them and only allow what is deemed "acceptable". It defeats the very purpose of a privacy enhancing service if a third party can monitor and censor you at any time.
full member
Activity: 1442
Merit: 106
The Bitcoins stolen via twitter on that faithful day may have been a negative flag in the minds of people and deterred loads of people from approving of the blockchain driven approach they were onced presented with but I thank the authorities for restoring the confidence in the technology and stating clearly that the attack was not on the technology but on the psychology and minds of gullible individuals.
legendary
Activity: 3178
Merit: 1140
#SWGT CERTIK Audited
Chipmixer is present again, but not the fault of the mixer as it's their service to mix coins regardless of the purpose of the clients.

Binance Hackers Bombard Chipmixer to Launder at Least 4,836 BTC

I don't know what would be the implication to the mixers since this is a popular incident, and I've heard some mixers before that are popular in the forum that was closed or the owner decide to close. Anyone who knows, is chipmixer safe here, or they should worry on the possible actions of authorities against them?
You are talking about bitmixer, it was a decent one at that time. I don't blame personally any mixers since they are offering what it should be a legal service to their clients. But i preferred to see some serious monitoring of the addresses containing the hacked money and freeze them once the money was sent...
hero member
Activity: 2856
Merit: 667
Chipmixer is present again, but not the fault of the mixer as it's their service to mix coins regardless of the purpose of the clients.

Binance Hackers Bombard Chipmixer to Launder at Least 4,836 BTC

I don't know what would be the implication to the mixers since this is a popular incident, and I've heard some mixers before that are popular in the forum that was closed or the owner decide to close. Anyone who knows, is chipmixer safe here, or they should worry on the possible actions of authorities against them?
legendary
Activity: 2842
Merit: 1511
Turns out they actually sent coins directly to Coinbase. Not only that, but they sent to Coinbase accounts which were fully verified with copies of their own IDs, used the same email addresses as they used on their OGUsers and Discord accounts where they were selling the hacked Twitter accounts, and logged in to Coinbase from the same unobscured IPs that they used when breaking in to Twitter accounts.

lol amateur hour. And the dummy already owned BTC300. I... can't... even...
full member
Activity: 301
Merit: 100
The crook will try to cover his tracks, but I don't think it will work. The case became too high-profile, so serious people took it on.
legendary
Activity: 3178
Merit: 1140
#SWGT CERTIK Audited
They could be good at whatever social engineering they used to get those emails and passwords but since Bitcoin is known as the money of the deep web and that currency that terrorists were using it was the obvious choice for these kids. They had no idea how to spend coins anonymously and the greatest proof to that is in the way they exchanged Bitcoins using Coinbase. I'm pretty sure they'll strike a deal and trade those coins for short jail time. If they don't they're dumb.

that $120k (now $150k?) worth of coin? i doubt the prosecutors even care about that, its chump change to the feds (well imo). these guys will be made an example of.
They care more about the information and the hacked accounts that they might have and especially the data harvested during the attack.
Many high profiles get hacked and no one knows whether the data were sold or not, imagine for example high political profiles data were leaked...
legendary
Activity: 2282
Merit: 1041

They are smart enough already to have mixed and use wasabi and coinjoin but one would take it back just when they were traced.  Yep just too overconfident they are not going to be traced. They sure know they are being traced since Jusin Sun put a bounty to whoever find them.

Thsi twitter hack though had put BTC on media, I think they helped the spread of information about cryptocurrency. Someone should still pat thier backs despite how stupid they've become after sending few BTC to coinbase and binance.
legendary
Activity: 3052
Merit: 1281
If anything, I'm actually quite surprised that some of those hackers/scammers risked moving out the funds(14.4%) without actually mixing/coinjoining them lol. It just shows that some of those scammers probably don't have the slightest idea on what they're doing and some just got lucky tricking security-illiterate Twitter people by using the typical giveaway scam.

They were probably very self confident thinking no one will disover what thry are doing and no one will track theur lead. Unfortunately this just shows that in many cases hackers and scamers still have pretry easy job. The big mistakes were made by Twitter two and they will need to explain a lot of issues in their security
Bitcoins that were going through mixers will probably never be traced

Probably yes they are overconfident or probably they forgot about the feature of transparency of BTC for a bit making those unmixed transactions, but it is kinda funny how that hacker never thought that a small transaction without mixers for conversion can pinpoint them and identify who they are.  The use of mixers was been nullified by this simple error of hackers.  I hope they get caught soon.
legendary
Activity: 2268
Merit: 18775
i cant tell you how many offices ive been to where login/passwords were posted in the plain sight of customers/clients/patients. tell management, later see nothings changed. maybe moved the post it note to the plant next to a monitor instead of the monitor itself. or etc.
Oh, absolutely. I'm also a big fan of the code for keypadded doors written in the corner of "STAFF ONLY" or "RESTRICTED ACCESS" notices affixed to said doors.

these guys will be made an example of.
Agreed. They are already talking about fines of up to $250,000 and 20 years in prison for the "lesser" of the two involved. The 17 year old is facing 30 charges, including one of "Organized Fraud (Over $50,000)" which carries up to 30 years in prison in Florida, and one of "Fraudulent Use of Personal Information (Over $100,000)" which also carries up to 30 years in prison along with a mandatory 10 year minimum.

All the talk about cleaning the bitcoin is more or less irrelevant. Even if they hadn't used this hack to steal bitcoin, the accounts on various platforms they used to communicate and sell accounts were set up with email addresses which had been linked to their real identities, and they did everything from their own home IP addresses which again had logged in to a variety of services linked to their real identities. They would have been caught regardless.
full member
Activity: 1442
Merit: 153
★Bitvest.io★ Play Plinko or Invest!
If anything, I'm actually quite surprised that some of those hackers/scammers risked moving out the funds(14.4%) without actually mixing/coinjoining them lol. It just shows that some of those scammers probably don't have the slightest idea on what they're doing and some just got lucky tricking security-illiterate Twitter people by using the typical giveaway scam.
  I don't know about this but I'm sure that they are smart enough coz they have broken some security of twitter, though it's quite a shallow dive from the hackers but still this is a breach, biggest breaching history in twitter I think. But I'm really wondering why they do not clean all of the stolen bitcoins with the mixers, worst is that they sent it directly to an exchange with a fully verified account, this is funny as hell, they could have used multiple mixers in cleaning. omg.


They were probably very self confident thinking no one will disover what thry are doing and no one will track theur lead. Unfortunately this just shows that in many cases hackers and scamers still have pretry easy job. The big mistakes were made by Twitter two and they will need to explain a lot of issues in their security
Bitcoins that were going through mixers will probably never be traced
How come that no one will discover? it could if they used mixers for all, but they did not. What's running inside their head when doing this, if I'm the scammer I'll send the bitcoins that will enter to the wallet address every time I receive any, multiple transaction with mixer, it's okay to be expensive at least safe and hard to track. Yet the have left a bag of bitcoins unspent, now I'm believing that there is a 17 yr old boy involved to this, could have been better history , nah I don't support crimes like this just kidding  Grin
legendary
Activity: 3010
Merit: 3724
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Think I'd be supporting Wasabi or Samourai or any other but yeah, the fact they sent almost 15% directly to exchanges, and then almost 15% to Wasabi (it's got great CoinJoin but for the amount they were sending and with all eyes on it, I personally don't think Wasabi or any other CJ wallet right now has a big enough usage to be a good enough privacy tool just yet.

@20kevin20: mixers and any other kind of privacy tools don't need all these news, they anyway have a bad reputation in the eyes of media. Criminals use banks and audit firms all the time for billions and billions of dollars in crime but the banks' reputations are unsullied. Strange? Nah, just the way the world works.
hero member
Activity: 1330
Merit: 569
I don't expect the scammers to do otherwise. Only a fool would steal money and not plan on how to find a way to spend it before even going ahead and now we are not talking about amount stolen on the counter or in the drawer which could run into several hundreds but thousands of dollars at this time. It's actually disappointing that situations like this is only making the case for those are the other end against bitcoin mixers as a way to hide their ill gotten wealth rather than what was intended for a way to promote privacy.
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