FBI didn’t hack Bitcoin — but it won’t say how it got DarkSide’s private key
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) says it won’t reveal how it “learned the private key” to hacker crew DarkSide’s Bitcoin wallet.
“I don’t want to give up our tradecraft in case we want to use this again for future endeavors,” said FBI assistant special agent Elvis Chan in a news call on Monday (via NBC News).
Earlier that day, the Department of Justice revealed about half of Colonial Pipeline’s ransom payment (63.7 BTC worth $2.3 million) had been recovered — just hours after the attack that crippled East Coast fuel distribution.
“Hacking Bitcoin” would take cracking its encryption algorithms; effectively impossible as it would take much longer than the universe has existed for current tech to brute force the private key to any one Bitcoin address.
But wording of the affidavit implies the FBI was already in possession of the private key. Some say that’s proof the FBI had it all along.
