Source: https://cobaltstrike.net/2022/02/25/530230-php/
Forbes magazine has published the results of a large-scale investigation of one of the largest cyber robberies in the history of Ethereum. The investigation was conducted by journalist Laura Shin with the participation of experts in the field of cryptocurrencies and with the help of a secret tool of Chainalysis, thanks to which it was possible to collect transaction data from the Wasabi Wallet.
We are talking about the theft of ether worth more than $ 11 billion (at the exchange rate today) from the DAO venture fund in 2016. The kidnapper turned out to be an Austrian programmer Toby Hoenisch. The hacker took advantage of a network outage and was able to continuously withdraw ether from the fund’s accounts. For the stolen funds, he bought Ethereum Classic tokens, and for them – bitcoins.
According to Shin, the CoinJoin mixer, which was used by Henish’s Wasabi Wallet crypto wallet, did not help the hacker hide his identity. The informants of the journalist and a secret tool from Chainalysis made it possible to track transactions and eventually reach the hacker himself. In particular, it was found out that the attacker transferred funds to a new wallet, inactive since the end of October, and then tried to use the ShapeShift exchanger to exchange funds for bitcoins.
According to an investigation published by Forbes, at the last and decisive stage, an employee of one of the exchanges confirmed to the Tire source that the funds were exchanged for a Grin privacy coin and transferred to a Grin node called grin. .toby.ai. He also explained that due to the exchange’s privacy policy, such customer information is usually not disclosed.
According to Shin, “one of the first uses of cryptocurrencies as a shield for anonymity is disappearing.” This is due to the growing pressure of regulators and the fact that transactions in public blockchains are tracked.
As the journalist noted, as new applications become available, anonymity in cryptocurrency transactions will continue to decline.
“The history of the DAO and the six-year search for a hacker demonstrates how far the crypto world and transaction tracking technologies have advanced since the first passion for cryptocurrency,” Shin summed up.