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Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

businessinsider.com

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Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#141

Post by jdsully »

HenryBemis wrote: post #125
LeonM wrote: post #48

My take on this is that they probably were insolvent for a long time already due to previous hacks/theft. The CEO just decided to lie about the supposedly 137M in funds 'safely' stored on his laptop. This is also what happened at MtGox, except that at MtGox they 'lost' wel over a million BTC. Edit: relevant listening: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/9/

And this is the problem. These guys are not regulated. There is no transparency. There are no external auditors. There is no control. When we find out, it is always too late. Every "cryptocurrency bank" is a potential Enron. I fear both the involvement of Central Banks and at the same time the lack of it. If EY (or anyone else serious about this) 'follows the money' then that would be a very interesting report to rea…

If they published the wallets everyone would be able to audit how much they have in trust. Its a lot more detail than you'd ever have with your traditional broker.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#142

Post by stordoff »

drexlspivey wrote: post #107
zaphirplane wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true, an entity with control of >50% of the pool can. I thought such a pool exists

Even with 100% of hashpower you can't steal anyone's money

You can stop them from ever spending it. You can't take it from someone, but you can stop them from using it - I doubt most people would consider that much of a difference (they still suffer the loss).

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#143

Post by stordoff »

chelmzy wrote: post #42
omouse wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The FBI/private companies have specialized tools for tracking Bitcoins throughout their lifespan. All the data is out in the open so there is no hiding unless he converted to Monero anonymously.

I was thinking you need a jump to cash somewhere, but even that would lead to _someone_. The coins can't just disappear.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#144

Post by diminoten »

deepspace wrote: post #35

Why is nobody talking about the convicted felon, Omar Dhanani aka Michael Patryn, who is a co-founder and majority shareholder of Quadriga? Dhanani is very much alive, and is known to have been involved in money laundering schemes. If I were an investigator in this case, that is the first door I would go knocking at.

Yeah it's so obvious, that I'm sure that is the first door they knocked on, and continue to monitor.

If he's got the cash, he's probably not spending it or acting like he's got it to the point that it ruled him out as a suspect.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#145

Post by stordoff »

solarkraft wrote: post #50
bootloop wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applying a zero-day exploit without making it public doesn't burn anything. After all, no one knows how they did it.

But would they even risk raising suspicion?

Why would it? If no one else knows the password, just say it was a weak password (or even that you got lucky). There's $137m missing, so clearly something went wrong - one more mistake wouldn't be hard to believe. Even if it does, does it matter? "There's a vulnerability in " is not exactly news or useful.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#146

Post by nodesocket »

g45y45 wrote: post #130
nodesocket wrote: post #121

I am curious to know the OS on the laptop that was cracked. macOS, Linux, Windows? I would be surprised if a highly technically founder was running Windows. Does this indicate there is a known vulnerability in the login process of the OS?

If i was to guess, i would guess that it was Bitlocker vuln, CVE-2018-12037, where the bitlocker crypto implementation is left to the junk SSD 'self encrypting' feature which is found to be broken. I have my doubts they cracked Veracrypt, LUKS or filevault2 with operator supplied keys. Or they got the keys from Microsoft/Apple (filevault2 and bitlocker will escrow the keys to the OS vendor in home editions).

So you think they broke the disk encryption not the OS login mechanism?

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#147

Post by blotter_paper »

HenryBemis wrote: post #125
LeonM wrote: post #48

My take on this is that they probably were insolvent for a long time already due to previous hacks/theft. The CEO just decided to lie about the supposedly 137M in funds 'safely' stored on his laptop. This is also what happened at MtGox, except that at MtGox they 'lost' wel over a million BTC. Edit: relevant listening: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/9/

And this is the problem. These guys are not regulated. There is no transparency. There are no external auditors. There is no control. When we find out, it is always too late. Every "cryptocurrency bank" is a potential Enron. I fear both the involvement of Central Banks and at the same time the lack of it. If EY (or anyone else serious about this) 'follows the money' then that would be a very interesting report to rea…

> Every "cryptocurrency bank" is a potential Enron.

Yeah, these institutions are antithetical to the whole cryptocurrency model. Regulation isn't necessary, education would suffice. The public is not yet ready for this paradigm, and perhaps never will be, but I'm hopeful.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#148

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

dtx1 wrote: post #5

How did they crack the Laptop? Just Bruteforcing a bad password or 0Day-ing the Encryption?

I don’t know about now, but in the past accessing an account was as easy as resetting the password in safe mode. I have done this numerous times when I worked in IT for people who forgot their passwords. It was such a stupid simple workaround. It wouldn’t surprise me if such workarounds still exist in win 10 and previous.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#149

Post by aloer »

eyezick wrote: post #92

This article is innaccurate. Here is the tracking by Ernst & Young (court-appointed) providing all the public information about these developments. The latest report on 1 March 2019 mentions nothing about a cracked laptop. https://documentcentre.eycan.com/Pages/Main.aspx?SID=1445

randomly clicked around there and saw the following about E&Y being ordered to post

"a copy of the Order on www.reddit.com/r/quadrigacx"

https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fin... p.10

i thought it's interesting how a third party, reddit, is used in such an official way. the other two channels to be posted on are E&Ys website and quadriga website

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#150

Post by usrusr »

ceejayoz wrote: post #72
xutopia wrote: post #68

This is BS... the money cannot be "gone"... what do they mean by that? There is a public ledger. We would know and can trace where this money went to. Do they mean the wallet was not on the laptop instead?

If the keys are lost, the money is for all intents and purposes gone.

If it's all gambled away on the crypto markets (quite likely to have happened), then it's just as gone as if on a lost address, only that some entirely unrelated market actors happened to get (temporarily) richer in the process.
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