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Authorities hack cryptocurrency seed phrase (www.abc.net.au)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

According to the article ‘the Australian Federal Police (AFP) will allege that an analytics specialist from the AFP's Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce deciphered Mr Jung's cryptocurrency account's "seed phrase".’

The word ‘decipher’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I’m wondering if they socially engineered or just found it written somewhere in the house?

Anyway, curious as to how they did it.

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[–] xantoxis 83 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

I highly doubt they did anything remotely like "hacking" the seed phrase. I don't care for cryptocurrency, but I hate cop bullshit even more, so here's my 2 cents.

or just found it written somewhere in the house?

this one.

A seed phrase is just an encoding of a long binary number which can be used to derive the secret key. Trying all the possibilities probably isn't possible, and I think it's also unlikely that they found a way to weaken it. What they probably did is find it and type it in. They DID raid the dude's house, where he was probably keeping a copy of it.

"Twenty or thirty years ago, police did not hack, that was not a thing that they did, but that's very much part of the bread and butter of a modern police force nowadays," Mr Uren said.

LMAO fuck off with this. I don't doubt they have some tech guys on hand. I don't think they have access to the quantum computer you'd need for this.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

They have guys that point guns at your face. This is their version of hacking.

[–] kameecoding 12 points 2 months ago

https://xkcd.com/538/

[–] Drunemeton 5 points 2 months ago

Ah, the ol’ “Brute Force” hack.

[–] Agent641 12 points 2 months ago

The shopping list on the suspect's fridge apparently required

Nebula
Tangle
Horse
Piper
Green
Sharp

Our technician called Coles and Woolies, who confirm these are not regular grocery items, and then he had a lightbulb moment: Beat the suspect with an extension cord until he gave up the seed phrase

[–] muntedcrocodile 7 points 2 months ago

I wrote a script to generate seed phrases and look up if that derived into a key with any value. Then did the maths on how impossible that is and decided to stop.

[–] peopleproblems 5 points 2 months ago

I mean if someone comes into your house with a clipboard and safety vest and a gun your probably going to let them do what they need if you can't fight them off.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

“Twenty or thirty years ago, police did not hack

Can confirm this is totally untrue. None of my in-laws would say either way, but for sure they wouldn't NOT say either way, if that makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Often times this language is used to drum up funding for exactly these types of things.