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North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

economist.com

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Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#121

Post by benmanns »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #106
butterfi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide a legitimate use case for mixers? (I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious)

Using Tornado was pretty common among well known/higher profile people in the space to avoid causing inadvertent market effects or leak info about upcoming projects. Basically if you were high profile enough, people would watch your wallets to see what you were investing in/transacting with, and use that as market intelligence. As far back as 2016 or so I recall someone specifically offering their blockchain analysis…

Also, if you want to be able to create legitimate projects that are not tied to your real-world identity, you need a break between bank -> exchange -> address -> ??? -> contract deployment address.

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#123

Post by DennisP »

butterfi wrote: post #61
acidtakes1 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why technology that provides a modicum of privacy must be demonized. It must be for money laundering and criminals. It can't have a legitimate use case. Is it used for nefarious activities? Of course, but not exclusively so.

Can you provide a legitimate use case for mixers? (I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious)

Providing some basic financial privacy, not from the government but from the general public. Everything on chain is public. When you buy something or transfer money to a friend, you don't necessarily want the recipient to know how much money is in your account, or what other addresses you've sent money to.

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#124

Post by drewmol »

smcl wrote: post #105
Salgat wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really surprising. NK is able to outsource their education to Chinese universities, and with a division that can yield $1.7B in revenue, it's not surprising they invest in this skillset, even if the country at large is destitute and backwards.

It is a surprise for those who take the common portrayal of the country at face value. We know it's not quite the "hermit kingdom" it's often described as, but most do not.

Any good sources on what it’s actually like?

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#125

Post by Closi »

eterps wrote: post #98
Closi wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intentional consealment of illegal internet traffic isn't a crime (the crime is just the crime). Intentional consealment of illegal financial transactions is a crime in-and-of itself (the crime is money laundering, which is a seperate offence to the original criminal activity that the money came from).

The point was whether using a mixer is a crime in itself.

Well it is a crime to use it for obscuring illegal money, while it is not illegal to use Tor for obscuring illegal internet traffic

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#129

Post by DennisP »

Phlarp wrote: post #77
exo762 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scenario one. Individual (while working in a startup) is receiving some tokens as a compensation. Time passes. Their remuneration being on-chain and visible is a problem when negotiating salary in the next job. Scenario two. I want to have on-chain identity (e.g. exo762.eth domain name). To register it I need to have some ETH (gas, registration fee). If I sent this ETH directly from my "money" account, I will forever…

How are these scenarios "use cases" for a mixer and not critical flaws in the underlying system? We're in a thread about a rogue state using the tech to steal money to fund their operations (Chemical attacks in airports, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, etc.) How many nuclear detonations would you consider acceptable in exchange for the cryptobros to have their toys?

How many would you consider acceptable to have an international banking system? North Korea hackers stole $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank, and it was only a fluke that they didn't get away with over a billion from that one hack.

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57520169

More prosaic wire fraud is common in real estate and B2B transactions, and if not noticed immediately the funds are often lost after being transferred internationally and cashed out. It wouldn't be surprising if NK is behind some of that, given what they managed against Bangladesh.

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#130

Post by barnabee »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #32

"mixers—large digital pools where crypto owners can deposit funds to obscure their origins." I have a quibble with articles about cryptocurrency fraud. They always get around to mixers and then they define it as if it were some relatively legitimate thing, like an odd bank. "large digital pools", "deposit funds". You have to get to the last phrase ("obscure their origins") to understand what mixers really are. A prop…

Ideally we would have a world where privacy is the default and everyone has it.

Because we don’t, and there is considerable friction required to have financial privacy, most people don’t bother unless they really need it or are unusually privacy conscious. Really needing it may often mean they are doing something nefarious.

That doesn’t mean the technology to enable privacy is “bad”, it means it’s too hard to use and that as a society we have done poorly at guaranteeing people’s right to privacy.

Not so long ago you might have ben able to say the same thing about people communicating with end-to-end encryption, but thanks to a concerted effort to improve the UX of this tech. and it’s adoption by some very widely used services, it’s now commonplace. End to end encryption could no longer be argued to be mostly used by criminals.

Hopefully we will get there with financial privacy too.

NB: in neither case am I suggesting that the government should be unable to require you to provide information in some situations (or face the consequences of withholding it against, say, a court order), only that dragnet surveillance of everyone by default is never acceptable.

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