White hat hackers join forces to find stolen virtual currency

White hat hackers join forces to find stolen virtual currency

Dozens of hackers are trying to find the thieves of cryptocurrency stolen from the Coincheck exchange. While it is unknown who was involved in the theft, white hat hackers played a key role in tracking down the stolen currency. One such hacker, who calls himself JK17 on Twitter, identified the accounts into which money was moved shortly after the theft and then began monitoring those accounts. This information was then passed on to the NEM Foundation, an international group that mana...

ges and promotes the currency.

Encouraged by the activities of white hat hackers, many engineers are joining the effort to track the movement of stolen funds.

Shota Hamabe, a 34-year-old computer programmer for an information technology company, is among the ethical hackers who use their knowledge to prevent cyberattacks and similar activities. He tracked the movement of the stolen NEM funds shortly after the theft. Hamabe meets at a computer bar in Tokyo, where he and like-minded people follow developments.

Meanwhile, websites have appeared that explain how to create programs to automatically track the movements of stolen NEM. In addition, simple graphic explanations of how the stolen money was distributed were posted on Twitter.


The thieves sent the purged NEM to more than 400 accounts, including accounts of owners not involved in the theft, to complicate the tracking process. It is believed that NEM, equivalent to 9 billion yen, was exchanged for bitcoin and other virtual currencies through a darknet website or websites that offer a high level of anonymity.

NEM has a unique feature designed to make transactions transparent. The sender of NEM can attach tokens, called mosaics, to the recipient's accounts. This feature, which Bitcoin does not have, is now used to track money stolen from Coincheck. White hat hackers send small amounts of NEM to mark the accounts into which the stolen cryptocurrency was transferred. This allows you to track when stolen cryptocurrency is transferred to third party accounts, although these accounts cannot be identified.




According to https://asia.nikkei.com

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