Direct from the desk of Dane Williams.
No, the hackers will likely not get away with the $15 million worth of ETH stolen from Crypto.com.
Due to their impatience and reliance on centralised tech, it looks like the hackers fucked up.
Let’s take a look at the story so far and have a discussion on what could and will happen in the future.
Crypto.com exchange hacked
I’m sure you’ve seen in the news recently that the Crypto.com exchange was recently the victim of a hack.
The retweets and gloating on Twitter from no-coiners has been really weird to watch, but highlights the mainstream reach of the story.
Crypto.com paused their withdrawals (yeah, that’s never going to go down well…) and scurried to communicate to their clients that they needed to update their 2FA:
Yikes.
But it was the following Tweet from security research company PeckShield Inc that sparked what I wanted to talk about in today’s blog:
So it looks like Crypto.com was actually taken for 4600 ETH in the hack.
That’s $15 million worth of Ethereum at the current market price.
Holy shit.
Now Crypto.com is obviously a massive, tightly regulated, centralised exchange that is not going to pass this loss onto their customers.
Sorry gloating no-coiners, you obviously still have a bit to learn about how things work…
Centralised tech and impatience
But what got me, was the fact that the hackers were dumb enough to send that $15 million worth of stolen ETH to the mixer service called Tornado Cash.
While you might think that all mixers will hide the money trail and allow you to cruise away with your millions of dollars, Tornado Cash is not one of them.
You see, the updated version of Tornado Cash actually includes a cryptographic note in the transaction history.
This note can then be used to determine where the funds came from and offer law enforcement the paper trail required to nab you.
How good.
You seriously can’t make this stuff up.
So these guys had the intelligence to hack one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world and escape with $15 million worth of ETH.
But weren’t smart or patient enough to effectively clean their crypto using a decentralised and untraceable method.
Dead set.
Wait until Monero hits THORChain
With that being said however, what were their other options?
Monero (XMR) certainly has the capabilities they were after, but finding somewhere to swap $15 million of ETH without anyone noticing, certainly isn’t an easy task.
So for a bounty that size, probably not.
But they did have the option of sitting on the ETH.
Sitting on the ETH and waiting until THORChain adds Monero.
Deep liquidity pools offering anyone the ability to swap native ETH for native XMR without permission?
It’s coming and once it does…
Game over.
Pro privacy and freedom of speech
Now, in saying all of this, I’d like to make it clear that I’m not actually pro-criminal.
What I am however, is a realist.
This is the exact same concept where we talk about having freedom of speech on Hive.
Do I want to see thieves gloating or filth sharing despicable pieces of content all over the place?
Fuck, of course not.
But I’m also not dumb enough to stick my head in the sand in today’s world and say it doesn’t happen and that the tech can be stopped by your government flicking a switch.
The cat is out of the bag and there are now systems in place that offer legitimate platforms for the private movement of funds and freedom of speech.
Each with extremely real, life changing use-cases for literally millions of people around the world.
This is why I’m here on Hive, writing about these sort of incidents and promoting the concept of both freedom and decentralisation.
Join the movement by clicking the get started button at the top right hand corner of this page and using your Twitter account to get your own Web3 Hive account.
Best of probabilities to you.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
