Have Crypto Detectives Killed the Cypherpunk Dream? - Ep. 461
Andy Greenberg, senior writer for WIRED and author of “Tracers in the Dark,” takes us inside the world of crypto-tracing crimebusters and voices the ambivalence of Bitcoin – a cypherpunk creation – eroding financial privacy. Hear how the longtime crypto scribe got law enforcement and sleuthing firms like Chainalysis to open up about their major wins in taking down darknet kingpins.
Show highlights:
why Andy thought early on that Bitcoin would enable crypto anarchy
how blockchain analytics started being used to tackle crime
why the IRS Criminal Investigation unit was more open to discussing its techniques
how Andy learned many new things about already well-known stories when writing about them for the book
the methods used to bring down the “biggest dark-web drug lord” in history
did AlphaBay’s Alexandre Cazes really kill himself in a Thai prison?
how researcher Sarah Meiklejohn developed tools to deanonymize Bitcoin
why she’s now uncomfortable that her techniques were adopted by Chainalysis and sold to law enforcement
what Andy feels about the importance of privacy
how Monero is harder to trace than Bitcoin but not untraceable
what the impact of zero-knowledge technology will be for blockchain analytics firms
whether the cypherpunk ethos is dead
why the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity will never die
Thank you to our sponsors!
Crypto.com
FTSE
Halborn
NYU
Guest
Andy Greenberg, senior writer for WIRED and author of “Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency”
Twitter
Writings for WIRED
Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency
Links:
WIRED:
The Hunt for the Kingpin Behind AlphaBay, Part 1: The Shadow
The Hunt for the Kingpin Behind AlphaBay, Part 2: Pimp_alex_91
The Hunt for the Kingpin Behind AlphaBay, Part 3: Alpha Male
De-Anonymization in Bitcoin with Sarah Meiklejohn | a16z crypto research talks
Wikipedia: Welcome to Video case
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131: Welcome to Video
Andy Greenberg (https://twitter.com/a_greenberg) brings us a gut wrenching story of how criminal investigators used bitcoin tracing techniques to try to find out who was at the center of a child sexual abuse darkweb website.
This story is part of Andy’s new book “Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency”. An affiliate link to the book on Amazon is here: https://amzn.to/3VkjSh7.
Sponsors
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77: Olympic Destroyer
In February 2018, during the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang South Korea, a cyber attack struck, wiping out a lot of the Olympic’s digital infrastructure. Teams rushed to get things back up, but it was bad. Malware had repeatedly wiped the domain controllers rendering a lot of the network unusable. Who would do such a thing?
We will talk with Andy Greenberg to discuss Olympic Destroyer, a chapter from his book Sandworm (affiliate link).
Sponsors
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Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers
Verge editor-in-chief talks with Wired senior editor Andy Greenberg, author of Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers.
Greenberg's book is all about a group of hackers inside the Russian government called Sandworm, who were responsible for damaging cyber warfare attacks in various countries over the past few years.
Andy and Nilay discuss the origins of Sandworm, the intricacies of their attacks, and how they escalated what we think of as "cyber war."
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54: NotPetya
The story of NotPetya, seems to be the first time, we see what a cyber war looks like. In the summer of 2017 Ukraine suffered a serious and catastrophic cyber attack on their whole country. Hear how it went down, what got hit, and who was responsible.
Guest
Thanks to Andy Greenberg for his research and sharing this story. I urge you to get his book Sandworm because it’s a great story.
Sponsors
This episode was sponsored by Linode. Linode supplies you with virtual servers. Visit linode.com/darknet and when signing up with a new account use code darknet2019 to get a $20 credit on your next project.
Support for this episode comes from Honeybook. HoneyBook is an online business management tool that organizes your client communications, bookings, contracts, and invoices – all in one place. Visit honeybook.com/darknet to get 50% off your subscription.
This episode was sponsored by CMD. Securing Linux systems is hard, let CMD help you with that. Visit cmd.com/dark to get a free demo.
For more show notes visit darknetdiaries.com/episode/54.
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