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Equation Group Cyber Weapons Auction

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Re: Equation Group Cyber Weapons Auction

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1,000,000 Bitcoin == 563,770,000.00 USD https://www.google.com/search?q=1000000+btc+in+usd

Sort of... When trading that large a fraction of the whole pool of BTC, the trade itself would drastically alter the value of a BTC. To the point that I'd be surprised if someone could openly acquire that large number of BTCs before being priced out of the market. The block chain makes it worse because everyone can see the progress of the buyer and there's no market maker with anywhere near this level of liquidity.

A private transaction of BTC wouldn't effect the market value of BTC. It is correct to say 1M BTC = 565M USD; the market price of BTC/USD is only effected when the BTC is sold on an exchange.

Re: Equation Group Cyber Weapons Auction

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The malware used in their operations, dubbed EquationDrug and GrayFish, is found to be capable of reprogramming hard disk drive firmware. Wow. We really are f----d all the way down the stack.

The row hammer attack convinced me of that. It feels like nothing is hardened at the very low levels that get hit by truly dedicated attacks. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer#Implications )

Geez, I'd never heard of this.. I just spent an hour reading up on it.. There's even a Javascript implementation (because of course there is)...

Re: Equation Group Cyber Weapons Auction

#123
If anyone's curious, I've put up the entire contents of the "free sample" up on GitHub: https://github.com/nneonneo/eqgrp-free-file. I'm hoping this speeds public analysis of the contents. So far, browsing through it all, it looks like code from 2010-2013 (so, not current by any means), but the exploits and implants look quite real.

Re: Equation Group Cyber Weapons Auction

#124
post #70
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart people screw up all the time.. If they're real, that's probably how these files got out there in the first place. If you got your hands on something like this, you probably think you're pretty smart, and you'd probably try to come up with some smart way to make some money off this, and this is the plan you'd come up with... See my first sentence...

Anyone who did even cursory research on Bitcoin would know that it's trivially traceable when redeemed.

Are you suggesting that BTC can't be laundered?

Re: Equation Group Cyber Weapons Auction

#125
post #12
post #9

The structure of this auction is amazing! 1. All bids are paid up front, and you never get your money back, even if you aren't the highest bidder. So if people bid $50, $70, and $100, they collect $220. 2. No one can verify what is actualy up for sale before the auction. 3. There is no way for the world to know that they actualy delivered the goods after the auction. 4. There is no way for the highest bidder to know…

>Everything about this auction is lined up to incentivize a scam. Yes, however the contents of the free sample seems very real. Without having dug into the binaries it's hard to tell, but it's hard to imagine someone wrote this to scam 1 million BTC out of the net.

Sure, but there's no incentive to hold anything back.

Let's say you break into a server and steal 10 vulnerabilities, from an organization (e.g. the NSA) who are never going to acknowledge how many vulnerabilities they had or were stolen.

If you want to get the most in the auction, the best thing you could possibly do is to release all 10 of your vulnerabilities for free, claiming that it's just a teaser, and that you have many more. Then you take in bids and disappear. It makes no sense to only release 2 or 3 and hold back the remainder; the unreleased ones are essentially wasted because they didn't actually contribute to any bidding activity: nobody knew they existed when they were bidding. That they exist at all is a happy surprise to the winning bidder, but with no further sales, customer goodwill isn't worth anything.

There's really no incentive to actually follow through on the sale at all. The only purpose of the "goods" to the seller is to attract bids, but with nobody to verify what's actually for sale, the best strategy is to use everything for what amounts to advertising, in the hope of gaining more attention and attracting more bids.

I wouldn't dump it all at once, if I were them, though. I'd do an initial release, and them some more once the initial bids (if there are any) slow down, and keep doing that over and over until the market is entirely worn out and all the vulnerabilities have been disclosed. That's the profit-maximizing strategy, I think.

Re: Equation Group Cyber Weapons Auction

#126
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The row hammer attack convinced me of that. It feels like nothing is hardened at the very low levels that get hit by truly dedicated attacks. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer#Implications )

Geez, I'd never heard of this.. I just spent an hour reading up on it.. There's even a Javascript implementation (because of course there is)...

It blew my mind when I first encountered it.

The basic idea - flip bits a lot until things crash - wasn't totally shocking. But learning that Project Zero had put up working privilege escalation attacks off something so bizarre? That's just too far.

At least Van Eck phreaking is still hard to use in practice...

Re: Equation Group Cyber Weapons Auction

#128
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who did even cursory research on Bitcoin would know that it's trivially traceable when redeemed.

Are you suggesting that BTC can't be laundered?

It can be, for example with tumblers, CoinJoin implementations, or conversion to cash at a willing financial institution. However, none of those avenues are reliable for someone facing a sophisticated global adversary.

Re: Equation Group Cyber Weapons Auction

#129
post #59
post #9

The structure of this auction is amazing! 1. All bids are paid up front, and you never get your money back, even if you aren't the highest bidder. So if people bid $50, $70, and $100, they collect $220. 2. No one can verify what is actualy up for sale before the auction. 3. There is no way for the world to know that they actualy delivered the goods after the auction. 4. There is no way for the highest bidder to know…

If they were really serious, they would be using Dark Leaks.

This is most likely a honeypot to make a list of potential enemies of the state.

Re: Equation Group Cyber Weapons Auction

#130
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of... When trading that large a fraction of the whole pool of BTC, the trade itself would drastically alter the value of a BTC. To the point that I'd be surprised if someone could openly acquire that large number of BTCs before being priced out of the market. The block chain makes it worse because everyone can see the progress of the buyer and there's no market maker with anywhere near this level of liquidity.

A private transaction of BTC wouldn't effect the market value of BTC. It is correct to say 1M BTC = 565M USD; the market price of BTC/USD is only effected when the BTC is sold on an exchange.

Almost no single entity has that much BTC (as of 2016 only ~15 million Bitcoins exist), to acquire it someone would have to aggregate the Bitcoins from many other entities by via buys on a Bitcoin exchange. This would cause a massive spike in the price of Bitcoin.

Interesting to note: there has been no new Bitcoin block for the last 1 hour 23 minutes. This happens from time to time, but it is a little suspicious.

See https://blockchain.info/

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