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Exclusive: Austrian Programmer And Ex Crypto CEO Likely Stole $11 Billion Of Ether, by Laura Shin | Forbeswww.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2022/02/22/exclusive-austrian-programmer-and-ex-crypto-ceo-likely-stole-11-billion-of-ether
118 sats \ 6 comments \ @cryptocoin 22 Feb 2022 bitcoin
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17 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 22 Feb 2022
Assuming this article is factual, it presents a pretty compelling case.
I'm mostly interested in how Wasabi txs were unrolled. It is merely a claim presented without evidence.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @deleted231216 23 Feb 2022
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @cryptocoin OP 22 Feb 2022
[...] appears to point to Toby Hoenisch, a 36-year-old programmer who grew up in Austria and was living in Singapore at the time of the hack. Until now, he has been best known for his role as a cofounder and CEO of TenX, which raised $80 million in a 2017 initial coin offering to build a crypto debit card—an effort that failed.
Since Hoenisch won’t talk to me, I can only speculate about his possible motives; back in 2016 he identified technical vulnerabilities in the DAO early and may have decided to strike after concluding his warnings weren’t being taken seriously enough by the creators of the DAO.
By the time the funding closed a month later, 15,000 to 20,000 individuals had contributed, The DAO held what was then 15% of all ether and the price of the cryptocurrency was steadily rising. At the same time, a variety of security and structural concerns were being raised about The DAO.
By the time the attack stopped a few hours later, 31% of the ETH in The DAO had been siphoned out into the DarkDAO.
The DAO smart contract had been written so that any time someone withdrew money, the smart contract would send the money first, before updating that person’s balance. The attacker had used a malicious smart contract that withdrew money (258 ETH at a time), then interfered with the updating of the contract, allowing them to withdraw the same ether again and again.
[...] Ethereum founder Buterin publicly weighing in, and after it seemed that a majority of the Ethereum community supported the measure, Ethereum did a “hard fork.” On July 20th the Ethereum blockchain was split into two. All the ETH that had been in the DAO was moved to a “withdraw” contract which gave the original contributors the right to send in their DAO tokens and get back ETH on the new blockchain. The old blockchain, which still attracted some supporters and speculators, carried on as Ethereum Classic.
Using a capability that is being disclosed here for the first time, Chainalysis de-mixed the Wasabi transactions [for bitcoin acquired using funds from the DAO Hack] and tracked their output to four exchanges.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @cryptocoin OP 22 Feb 2022
Recalled a still astounded Hosp: “For some weird reason, he was quite well aware of what was happening…He understood more of the DAO hack when I asked him what had happened…than I had found on the internet or anywhere.”
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @cryptocoin OP 22 Feb 2022
At this point, the attacker used a Wasabi wallet, which mixes many transactions together in order to obscure the funds flow in a process called a CoinJoin. It was thought that the bitcoins spit out on the other side of a CoinJoin were impossible to trace back.
While at that time, it may have been sufficient to turn the trail cold, with this news, Chainalysis is disclosing for the first time that it is able to de-mix such transactions.
When the attacker used Wasabi, they must have felt that their bitcoins had been sufficiently laundered. However, that was no longer true once Chainalysis’s technology improved over time.
Who Was Behind the 2016 DAO Attack on Ethereum? The Backstory to My Investigation https://laurashin.bulletin.com/who-was-behind-the-2016-dao-attack-on-ethereum-the-backstory-to-my-investigation
In the end, my years-long effort unspooled in a few weeks. I feel confident about the evidence, which my sources also felt was extremely strong. Once we had everything, they marveled: "The evidence is never this good."
Who Hacked the DAO on Ethereum? Here’s How We Jumped Past One Critical Step https://medium.com/@laurashin/who-hacked-the-dao-on-ethereum-heres-how-we-jumped-past-one-critical-step-60aec489a127
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryptocoin OP 22 Feb 2022
In her investigation, Laura alleges that the DAO hacker is Toby Hoenisch, ex-CEO of a failed ICO TenX.
Seems to have messed up by using his IP address without VPN and his username for his lightning and grin nodes. Wild if true
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