How did they crack the Laptop? Just Bruteforcing a bad password or 0Day-ing the Encryption?
I think this is the $137 million dollar question.
So they thought. Turns out it was worth nothing.
Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone
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Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone
#12> The investigators said they found other issues too, such as that Quadriga kept "limited books and records" and never reported its financials.
New SaaS idea: Skin Lotus 1-2-3 and sell it as a "decentralized on-premise bookkeeping solution for your blockchain"
Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone
#13For some reason this sounds like the plot of a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. CEO of Crypto Company... 1) Takes time off to build orphanage in region noted for fake deaths. 2) Subsequently dies unexpectedly. 3) Is immediately cremated. 4) Wife waits a month before saying "oh by the way he is dead" 5) Wife claims all keys on encrypted laptop 6) World watches as wallets mysteriously empty 7) Experts crack laptop 8)…
DiCaprio? This whole affair has been at best a Weekend at Bernie's-level plot. The accounts were emptied 8 months before the death, and yet QCX pretended they were solvent the whole time so they could keep the party going.
Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone
#14How did they crack the Laptop? Just Bruteforcing a bad password or 0Day-ing the Encryption?
I'm guessing they brute forced into his laptop (or used a windows exploit or something) and opened up the program to find the cold wallet addresses (which is amazing they didn't have elsewhere) and then found them to be empty. Even if they didn't have the private keys, they'd just need the address to discover the balance. Though, the keys were also probably on the laptop.
Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone
#15How did they crack the Laptop? Just Bruteforcing a bad password or 0Day-ing the Encryption?
Based on what I've read, the NSA and other white-hat organizations have access to 0-days or have discovered 0-days that can crack these things but they're not released to the public or if they are, they're released years later.
TFA says that Ernst and Young was the company to crack the laptop. Ernst and Young would not burn a zero-day exploit on an auditing job.
Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone
#16This guy is alive (or dead, but not due to Crohn's Disease complications, as stated initially).
This is not a conspiracy theory anymore. It's clear there's a massive fraud behind all these events.
Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone
#17Wow! Do we know if this was some sort of scam or what? Thats... just wow....
The odds of it not being a scam is pretty tiny number. Not scientific notation small, but getting there.
Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone
#18For some reason this sounds like the plot of a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. CEO of Crypto Company... 1) Takes time off to build orphanage in region noted for fake deaths. 2) Subsequently dies unexpectedly. 3) Is immediately cremated. 4) Wife waits a month before saying "oh by the way he is dead" 5) Wife claims all keys on encrypted laptop 6) World watches as wallets mysteriously empty 7) Experts crack laptop 8)…
DiCaprio? This whole affair has been at best a Weekend at Bernie's-level plot. The accounts were emptied 8 months before the death, and yet QCX pretended they were solvent the whole time so they could keep the party going.
The Great Gatsby...
Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone
#19Wow! Do we know if this was some sort of scam or what? Thats... just wow....
We don't know, but people have been speculating that the death was faked in order to get away with theft and mismanagement of Quadriga wallets. Every new detail seems to suggest a scam and fake death.
The scam conclusion is stronger than, and does not rely on, the fake death one. The combination does seem to be the most likely, but even if he's really dead, this still looks like a scam.
Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone
#20Maybe I don't know much about bitcoin, but can't you track the address where the bitcoins were being transferred to? Seems like it would be difficult to launder that volume of bitcoin all anonymously where it can be tracked, to a certain extent, through the public blockchain?
There are bitcoin tumblers , essentially the idea is to split up the transaction into multiple transactions of varying sizes to various addresses and to keep doing that in such a way that it doesn't look weird... Basically they try to hide the transaction among the huge volume of transactions going on, kinda like a VPN or Tor?
It’s important to note that it’s not just splitting up your own transactions, it’s that it’s actually other people’s coins that end up in your destination wallets. As such, it becomes very difficult to trace: techniques for doing this are similar to large scale deanonimization of Tor traffic, and involve large scale pattern analysis.