A Forbes research revealed the identity of the suspected hacker who stole USD 11 billion. A private feature of the Chainalysis data explorer detected personal transactions.
Forbes magazine posted an investigation highlighting that an Austrian developer named Toby Hoenisch would be the alleged attacker of one of the largest thefts in Ethereum ever made. The finding got achieved by reporter Laura Shin with the assistance of other experts and a tool from the Chainalysis explorer that tracks private bitcoin operations made from Wasabi Wallet.
The report made by Laura Shin would highlight that the CoinJoin mixer implemented by Wasabi Wallet, the bitcoin wallet the attacker used to carry out the hack of The DAO, did not help keep his identity veiled.
This situation seems relevant because CoinJoin is a protocol that opens the door to the mixing of cryptocurrencies and boosts the privacy and anonymity of its users by keeping their identities safe, mostly from blockchain analysis tools.
The reporter’s investigation also unveiled that a secret tool from the blockchain explorer Chainalysis gained the possibility to identify the hacker’s activities in Wasabi Wallet, which places the execution of CoinJoinin uncertain fields and reveals the possible identity of the criminal.
The theft took place back in 2016 by attacking a central piece of financing that the venture capital fund The DAO had acquired. The hacker carried out its activities due to a network failure that repeatedly transferred ethers from the entity. The attacker then switched them to ETC, the Ethereum Classic token, and Bitcoin, whose value reaches more than $11 billion.
Chainalysis’ Efforts to Follow and Track Mixed Bitcoins
Laura Shin explained that a tool from Chainalysis followed the attacker’s operations and managed to reveal his identity. The report also highlights that the hacker migrated the currencies to a new inactive wallet until October. The criminal then intended to use ShapeShift to convert the funds into bitcoin.
ShapeShift did not take personally identifiable data, so the hacker’s true identity remained unveiled, even though all of his blockchain activities were apparent. Over the next two months, the hacker extracted at least 282 bitcoins, which ran parallel to at least $232,000 and got valued at more than $11 billion today.
The researcher also highlighted that ShapeShift then frequently obstructed her attempts to exchange because it detected the currencies as being from The DAO attacker.
The user could not keep carrying out exchange operations with digital currencies and left behind at least 3.4 million ETC.
The report considered that, based on a study led by Coinfirm, the alleged attacker had migrated at most minuscule 50 bitcoins to a Wasabi wallet; the reporter also mentioned that she used a feature to track operations for the first time.
This tracking is an exciting feature because Wasabi is a Bitcoin wallet that focuses on anonymizing activities like transactions through CoinJoin; its real goal is to set a complex procedure on the trail of these transactions.
By: Jenson Nuñez
