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Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

wired.com

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Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#81

Post by kube-system »

DANmode wrote: post #55
kube-system wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate on crypto any chance I get, but crypto has damn near a monopoly in facilitating black and/or grey market electronic transactions. It is very in demand, for instance, in helping dictators evade sanctions, or helping criminals extort or trade illegally.

I suppose you could count Venezuelans going hungry as "criminals". But I wouldn't.

BTC doesn't have a $1.3T market cap because of the utility it has in buying beans in Venezuela.

Of course, people there may use it for that purpose, but that demand is a negligible part of the overall demand for cryptocurrencies.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#83

Post by bandushrew »

behringer wrote: post #76
INTPenis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh absolutely. Money is the root of all evil. But crypto bros are often delusional about what intrinsical value exists in the normal market, compared to crypto coins where they invent the value. Therefore manipulation of value compared to real world markets becomes a lot more abstract.

One of the greatest uses of crypto is the ability to transfer any amount of money to any point on earth for next to nothing and no questions asked. That is worth more than most any other use for crypto.

Except that you cant, in a practical sense.

I can sell crypto to anyone, anywhere.

That cannot be used to purchase anything, anywhere.

Its only useful for a very narrow subset.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#84

Post by Borealid »

loumf wrote: post #51
arp242 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have bank passwords, social media accounts (which can be used in all sorts of nefarious ways), etc. Some may be 2FA protected, some may not be. Some may be protected by bad faux-2FA. Just because there aren't million at stake doesn't mean you can't bring someone to ruin.

You can try millions of passwords on a wallet without anything stopping you. You only get a few guesses on a bank site.

If you only get a few guesses on a bank site, then you can inconvenience large numbers of users cheaply.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#85

Post by dylan604 »

currymj wrote: post #75
dylan604 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After your reco after the GP's reco, I would have to agree. This is well done. However, coming from a coding/dev background, it was easy to follow and it all makes sense. However, it goes to show why hacking will never be made interesting in movies without a bunch of fake nonsense like hacking the Gibson's 3D virtual environment.

“Hackers” is interesting because there’s two depictions of hacking in the same movie. One is flying through the holographic city of files. The other depiction is quite realistic: they show the protagonist spending all night reading through many pages of assembly to reverse engineer a virus, people do social engineering, etc. “Hackers” made this seem cool too!

"Sneakers" - 1992

"Hackers" - 1995

Sneakers had them going through the trash, setting up a mark on a fake date, and staking out a building and the security company it used with all sorts of stuff not once looking at a computer screen to "hack" three years earlier.

I like Hackers for the campy side of things, but Sneakers will still take a higher spot on my list.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#86

Post by lazide »

wepple wrote: post #28
paulpauper wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the vast majority of ppl who use it will not be storing millions of dollars of crypto with it. Crypto changes the game totally.

Crypto doesn’t change the game. Products that generate passwords should do so securely. You may be using it to protect extremely sensitive information that could have people killed - that’s more important than a few million dollars in imaginary money

What if a few million dollars in imaginary money is more than enough to pay someone to kill some folks?

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#87

Post by fallingsquirrel »

demondemidi wrote: post #61
DANmode wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose you could count Venezuelans going hungry as "criminals". But I wouldn't.

Oh god this gets trotted out every time someone points out the evil that crypto facilitates. Give it a rest. It pales in comparison and there are many other solutions that your argument conveniently ignores.

The vast majority of bitcoin use is legal.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29396/w293...

> For example, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume.

Sure there's the odd dumb criminal who doesn't understand the prosecutorial implications of an immutable public ledger. But it pales in comparison, according to the actual data.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#88

Post by fallingsquirrel »

demondemidi wrote: post #62

That is super lucky. They didn’t break the crypto, they broke the PRNG. Amateur wallet design. Any security programmer with a passing knowledge of NIST entropy requirements 800-90 a/b/c would have never done this.

To be fair, this was not a wallet bug. It was a bug in an unrelated password manager.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#89

Post by slicktux »

pentagrama wrote: post #82

I was completely engrossed throughout the entire article, and by the end, I was left eagerly wanting to know what the password was. I guess I've watched too many movies.

Someone linked the YouTube video…it shows the password… Great watch!

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#90

Post by evilfred »

behringer wrote: post #76
INTPenis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh absolutely. Money is the root of all evil. But crypto bros are often delusional about what intrinsical value exists in the normal market, compared to crypto coins where they invent the value. Therefore manipulation of value compared to real world markets becomes a lot more abstract.

One of the greatest uses of crypto is the ability to transfer any amount of money to any point on earth for next to nothing and no questions asked. That is worth more than most any other use for crypto.

but you can't. you can't send Bitcoin or Eth around the world for "next to nothing" today. not in a reasonable time frame. and that isn't accounting at all for the massive power wastage in the Bitcoin case.
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