Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds (washingtonpost.com)

Article summary

The Justice Department seized $3.6 billion in bitcoin allegedly stolen in a 2016 hack of Bitfinex, and arrested a husband and wife in New York for allegedly trying to launder the cryptocurrency. The couple is accused of trying to launder 119,754 bitcoin stolen after a hacker breached Bitfinex. Authorities gained access to the stolen funds by decrypting a file saved to the suspect's cloud storage account. The file contained private keys to the bitcoin wallet.

Main themes

• bitcoin laundering
• cryptocurrency security
• opsec practices
• password cracking
• law enforcement methods
• conspiracy theories

What commenters say

• The use of a simple password that could be brute-forced is seen as amateurish, especially with large amounts of money at stake.
• Some argue that only dumb criminals get caught, and that professional crews with perfect opsec are never heard from.
• The idea that the authorities used illegal access and tools to decrypt the file is proposed as a conspiracy theory.
• It is suggested that the thief's opsec practices were flawed, and that using a hardware wallet and memorizing a seed phrase would have been more secure.
• The possibility of a $5 wrench attack is seen as a vulnerability of memorizing a seed phrase.
• Some argue that the authorities' methods for decrypting the file may have involved keyloggers or other forms of surveillance.
• The use of a strong key derivation function, such as Argon2id, is seen as a more secure approach than using a simple hash function like SHA256.