Petya Ransomware Funds Travel Through the Tumbling Process
As the mainstream media portrayed it to be, the hottest Petya ransomware was mad, and the creators only made off with $8,000 in extortion funds. One of the reasons was due to their email being closed down. What is intriguing about the Petya ransomware is that the hackers decided to use one address to collect funds to addresses used in these kinds of protocols. After a day or two, the hackers started moving the money. Individuals following the capital believe the money was sent through a tumbler or a stage that mixes bitcoins to be able to obfuscate the procedurebitcoincasino app id=”attachment_52188″ class=”wp-caption aligncenter”>A depiction of a Coinjoin mix or tumbling process and best bitcoin casino 2015.
‘A Great Majority of Transfers had Over fifty Total Transactions’
According to the publication Quartz those bitcoins will be hard for law enforcement to locate. The news outlet says they followed the money as far as they could, but the bitcoins were sent through a series of transfers and among them was a bitcoin exchange that is legitimate. After the first few jumps, the publication details funds were sent to a”high volume speech” which they assumed was that the trading platform.
They could only speculate on which trades belonged to Petya , after this point Quartz explains.
“We collected each spent output with that address, then each spent output from these addresses, etc,” explains Quartz columnist Keith Collins. “In order to limit the amount of rabbit holes that the crawler followed, we just included transfers which occurred within eight hours of the first incoming trade from the first wallet. We considered high-volume wallets to be pockets that had three or more total trades, as returned from the Blockchain.info API, but the vast majority of those had more than ten complete trades”
This film depicts the Petya funds which were mixed through over 2000 addresses.
Taking Action Against Digital Currency Mixers
There are ways for individuals and groups to mix their bitcoins to confuse blockchain surveillance. These include tumblers like Joinmarket and the many other mixing platforms located on the web. Further, some users elect to utilize altcoins like Monero and Zcash, because they consider these cryptocurrencies offer anonymityUse the best usa bitcoin casino In the future, many individuals believe better forms of anonymization that is cryptocurrency will come like types of Zero Knowledge platforms and Schnorr signatures. However, government officials and law enforcement have been saying for a while that anonymizers and bitcoin mixers should be illegal. For instance, the Basel Institute on Governance, Europol, Interpol, and U.S. officials have been discussing proposals to”do it against electronic currency mixers/tumblers.”
Can Law Enforcement Really Follow 2373 Hops?
Quartz details that the Petya funds were estimated to be sent to over 2373 addresses over the duration of the process. “If we knew what bitcoin addresses or address the Petya cash ended up in, we would likely find thousands and thousands of transactions between that speech and the beginning address,” explains the information outlet. “That’s more than we could ever graph.”
The news comes at a time when blockchain surveillance companies have become a hot topic, and lately Chainalysis claimed to know the destination of the 650,000 Mt Gox bitcoins that is missing. Forensic companies may be fabricating how well they can follow these trades with hackers mixing their coins.
What do you consider mixing transactions? Do you think the outputs can be actually followed by law enforcement when funds are sent through a bitcoin tumbler? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via Shutterstock, Quartz, and Pixabay.
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Source: bitcoincasinoreview.net
