How will Twitter hackers charge Bitcoin for scamming users after Wednesday’s epic rape? Put the coins through Bitcoin mixers to obfuscate your trail, and they’ve already started, according to cryptocurrency tracking firm Elliptic.
The blockchain analytics company today released a report that it has uncovered evidence that Twitter hackers have sent a portion of the stolen Bitcoin to an address it believes is linked to a Wasabi wallet. Wasabi is a Bitcoin mixing service that uses the CoinJoin privacy technique to hide traces of transactions on Bitcoin’s pseudonymous blockchain.
According to Elliptic, such techniques make it “difficult for police investigators or financial institutions to track funds on the blockchain,” although they are not illegal.
The tracking company said it believes Twitter hackers have so far put 2.89 Bitcoin, roughly 22% of the $ 120,000 in stolen BTC, through the Bitcoin mixer.
“The use of this type of wallet by those who launder the profits from the Twitter hack is not surprising,” Elliptic said in his report. “One of the most common techniques used by the police to identify the perpetrators of this type of attack is to keep track of the money to the point of withdrawal.”
The report’s authors noted that most crypto exchanges KYC controls to identify your customers. It is this type of identifiable information that can be used by the police to link crime to real-life identities of hackers. But using a Wasabi wallet or other similar service makes it more difficult, the firm said.
Coinbase, the leading U.S.-based crypto marketplace, which took steps to block transactions associated with the Twitter hack, is among Elliptic’s clients.
Meanwhile, according to a story in the New York Times On Friday afternoon, the hack appears to have been the work of a group of at least four young people.–and not a “nation-state or a sophisticated group of hackers”. In his interview with hackers, the Times He learned that a hacker lives on the west coast of the United States and is around 20 years old, while another said he was 19 years old and lives in the south of England.
Hackers told the Times, as VICE was previously told, that the hack was orchestrated by an individual (Discord’s screen name “Kirk”) who claimed to work on Twitter.
