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DNS Hijack Leads To Bitcoin Heist
First time accepted submitter FearTheFez writes "Social Engineering and poor DNS Security lead to a Bitcoin heist worth about $12000. Bitcoin broker Bitinstant was robbed after thieves managed to take over ownership of their domains. While Bitinstant claims that no customers lost any money, without 2 factor authentication all it took was a place of birth and a mothers maiden name to gain access. This looks like poor security from everyone involved."
Bitinstant's mother. She knows both her maiden name and his birthdate, probably.
I do not think that any court or official government body recognizes your television as being a legitimate currency but I can be prosecuted for stealing it. If it has value to the owner, it can be stolen.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Lamps, dog food, and records aren't currency, but if someone broke in your house stole them from you it would still be a crime.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
If a standard currency exchange was robbed for $12,000 we would not even read the story. This is a trivial crime and of little interest. It serves more as a warning rather than as a bank robbery story. I hope that those that are concerned learn from this but if this is the crime of the century in the Bitcoin world then they are doing really well.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
You can't steal data, but do you have the right to copy it? And can you copy bitcoin? Is bitcoin data?
they don't have serial numbers because they are themselves nothing more than a number. as such they don't need globally unique identifier as they are already all unique numbers
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
I've heard a few people with bitcoins complaining about how they can't do anything with them and they're locked in. Apparently there's an online store that catalogs all the stuff you can buy all over the place, with bitcoins . . . and it looked to me like the kind of shitty collection of stuff you'd expect at a flea market. High priced low-end windows laptops and speaker wire and shampoo and shit.
You talk here about theft worth only 300 BTCs or 12 000$
Well, I can only conclude that overall BTC security maybe has improved. Recall previous thefts worth of 25 000 BTC or 500 000$ (at that time) or 18 547 BTC or 87 000$ (at that time).
Why such conclusion? Well, if those evil people started to go after such low-profile target, it *can* mean that all high profile targets have adequate security.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Current BTC exchange rates and trading volumes offer quite a different view.
Write failed: Broken pipe
It's wire fraud. Nobody needs to recognize the currency to prosecute for that.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Eh. There's plenty of intelligence here: but these days, it mostly comes in the ossified form of Clarke's elderly scientist:
"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong."
Bitcoin, Climate Change, etc. /. got old...
Capcha: compost. heh...
The court ruled that:
*) Virtual items have value in virtual of the effort and time invested in obtaining them
*) The value in Virtual items is recognised by those that play the game (including the defendents who went to the trouble to take them)
*) The Virtual items were under the exclusive control of the player – who was relieved of this control
The court made reference to cases of electricity theft which is a similar intangible good but certainly has properties of power and control, and consequently can be stolen.
http://www.virtualpolicy.net/runescape-theft-dutch-supreme-court-decision.html
it's in my head
You can't steal language because nobody is trying to keep language a secret. It's public domain. It doesn't belong to anyone.
bitcoins aren't data per se. A person's private key for their bitcoin wallet that is used to transfer ownership of bitcoins is data. It's just a long number. The proof of work used to establish a bitcoin is data. The transaction history of each bitcoin is data.
A bitcoin is more than just the data underlying it. There are may thousands of copies of each bitcoin, but at any given time only one person has the authority to transfer a bitcoin to someone else.
A bitcoin itself cannot be copied. To copy a bitcoin would mean copying it's ability to be spent (allowing it to be spent twice). This would ruin any currency. And much of the design of bitcoin is prevention of double spending.
This is similar to how xeroxing your bank statement doesn't double the amount of money you have in the bank.
BTC is divisible into smaller units. To quote the link:
In trade, one bitcoin is subdivided into 100-million smaller units called satoshis, defined by eight decimal places.
Your entire argument is therefore invalid. Perhaps you shouldn't have wasted so much time typing it.
Write failed: Broken pipe
If someone steals your car in the night, you find no car in your driveway in the morning. If someone steals your television, you have nothing to watch this evening. If someone steals anything, the stolen item is no longer in your possession: that's what stealing is.
In your example, the money was stolen. The data, however, was not.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Not exactly; Bitcoins themselves don't have or are numbers, they're just an amount.
The Bitcoin protocol is essentially a ledger. In order to take some bitcoins from an account, you need to identify where did they come from (previous transaction crediting that account).
So, transactions have hashes, but coins themselves don't; they're just amounts that get transferred.
Dilbert RSS feed
Do people really use this stuff in place of real money? I'll keep my real cash thanks... And as the world's currencies (particularly the dollar) are being intentionally devalued, I'll hang on to my precious metals.
Hey is that you Ebenezer Scrooge?
Mothers maiden name: 9zimu8sj4q99uf
Place of birth: wj9awitkj4girc
If you use real details, you're a fool.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
I think the court got it wrong, The value inherent in virtual goods is in the price that people are willing to pay for them or would be willing were they on the market. Supply and demand dictates value.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
No, Bitcoins aren't data, they are imaginary. What was stolen were the secret keys (data) that allow you to spent the Bitcoins. Or you could say that the ownership certificate was changed without the permission of the previous owner.
Maybe it's a bit like if I "steal" your car by convincing the world that it is legitimately mine? Or like if I convince our circle of friends that your imaginary friend hates you now and spends all his time with me so when you tell stories about your adventures with him nobody believes you any more ;)
what actually happens in this type of incident? from what i read, the bitcoin is supposed to be tied to your secret keys and whatnot. so what do they actually steal from the "broker"?
One of the thieves was later seen at the racetrack, trying to put down 1024 bitcoins on a horse in the third race.
He was apprehended and later sentenced to 10 years of ridicule without possibility of parole.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This looks like poor security from everyone involved.
This is perhaps arguable in the case of VirWox, the exchange used to move the money out of the account. According to the article, VirWox has offered two factor authentication since September of last year. The fact that BitInstant didn't use it allowed the attackers to succeed with the heist. I say arguable because two factor authentication should probably be mandatory for anything that involves monetary transactions.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Yes, you could do that, and in fact they did. However it doesn't really help because there's no supporting infrastructure for people to download lists of tainted outputs and trigger alerts when a transaction rooted on that output shows up in your wallet, and if there was, it isn't clear what you would do about it, and even if it was, it isn't clear how you'd stop people gaming the system by claiming coins as stolen when they actually were not. But it's technically feasible.
Supply and demand dictates value.
The court's 1) is supply and 2) is demand.
One way of doing it is to use somebody else's info for password reset so you can remember what you entered. Maybe you pick John Kennedy. You'd enter Kennedy's mother's maiden name, Kennedy's dog's name, etc. That way anyone impersonating you by entering your data doesn't get in, but you don't have to remember nonsense answers.
Believe it or not that was only approximately 266 bitcoins.
what about MMO games where you can take stuff form others as part of game play and let's say there are 3rd party sellers in game that lets you buy stuff with cash and also sell stuff for cash?
How will the courts look at that?
Some one can say Bitcoin is a game with real cash stores as part of it.
It is not the data that is being stolen. Data is just bits and bytes, kilobytes etc. of ones and zeroes.
What APPEARS AS being stolen is the information encoded within the data.
What is actually happening is UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS. Possibly unauthorized dissemination of information, revealing of trade and other secrets etc. IF the information is relayed to a third party.
It helps if you think of it as a case of early 20th century spying.
A spy intercepts and reads an enciphered radio transmission - he has the data but no information. Information gets to its intended recipient, clearly not stolen.
A spy deciphers the transmission - he has access to what he was actually after. The information.
Information still gets to its intended recipient, still not stolen, BUT - the spy above has also had access to information.
So far, all that the spy is guilty of is unauthorized access.
If and when he delivers the information to the third party, then he is guilty of various other things. None of them being stealing.
You can absolutely steal data. If you steal someone's debit card and buy a bunch of stuff with it, you have stolen data that allowed you to gain access to their bank account. Someone else ends up losing the stolen dollars you used.
That is not stealing data.
That is stealing a physical object, a debit card, THEN using it without authorization to gain access to the bank account, THEN stealing the money from the account.
No data was stolen. No, not even when the money was stolen in the end.
Data on the card was USED to access the bank account but it was not stolen - the CARD was stolen. And the money.
Same way you are not stealing the position of the teeth on a key used to open a safe - you are stealing a key.
Now, making a copy of the card or key - that's unauthorized copying OR just making a copy.
When you bring a "borrowed" key to a key copying store, the employee is not copying a key without authorization. He is just making a copy.
YOU are doing the unauthorized copying, but only if there is a specific rule prohibiting access to that key or making copies of it.
Same with the card.
Making a copy is unauthorized copying, accessing the account is unauthorized access, stealing money is stealing - but the card or the data were not stolen.
Money was.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Amateur bankers hustled by trivial attack. Film at eleven.
In your example, the money was stolen. The data, however, was not.
When was the last time you visited the bank and asked them to actually show you your money?
Last time I checked my bank balance it was via a NetBank screen, so I suppose that amount is nothing more than a database variable right?
Wait, did I just make bank robbery legal? Hold on ...
some games do have a in game store that they get a cut of the sales.
Now just saying a game maker can have all kinds of stuff in it but then what happens when that mixes with real laws out side of the game??
Let's say hacking is part of the game but let's just say the game makes messed up and you can get into people real data or a in game hack ends up taking down a sever.
But if you use the same person's data for every site you still have the problem of a hacker being able to use the information from one of the sites to get into all of the others.
You can steal anything that has value if you intend to permanently deprive the owner of said property. There is no requirement in law to show a physical object, only the property has value.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
A bit like the way that China is convincing everyone that they own Taiwan?
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Zero value for criminal prosecution.. The loss of family photos would end up in civil court I believe, and could possibly bring in millions depending on "harm" determined there..
Family photos that were stolen in a criminal case would probably have the same value any other random photo's fair market value (not much).
The individual accounts are numbered, in fact the number is the public part of a public-private key pair. An account has a balance which is the sum of all past incoming and outgoing transaction amounts. The amounts are in units called "bitcoins", which are recorded to 8 decimal places. Thus my account is currently 8.51336124 BTC. A transaction is a message signed with your private key (that's how you prove you have the right to make a transaction) giving the number of units to send, and the destination account number.
All past transactions are stored in a public ledger, called the block chain. So everyone can look at past transactions for a given account, and see if their current balance is sufficient for a new transaction. If not, the transaction is rejected, by everyone. This prevents "double spending", ie spending money you don't have.
What happened in this theft was VirWox, the exchange which was holding some coins for the victim, was convinced to send them to the thief's account. This is in fact traceable by VirWox and everyone else. You can then follow the money in later transactions wherever it goes. The tricky part is identifying the human that goes with an account number, since account numbers don't have personal information attached to them.
You can shop for anything online using http://bitspend.net/
Amazon, newegg, ebay, department stores, etc.
You can get a US Dollar-denominated Mastercard debit card from http://www.okpay.com/en/services/accept-payments/index.html
and fund it with bitcoins.
Yes we do. And how are "dollars", which mostly exist as database entries, backed by securities which *also* exist as database entries, any more "real"?
The bitcoin network consists of people willing to trade goods and services, and an account database that tracks balances. The database is designed to be very secure, so people are comfortable trading an item now for a balance, with the expectation they can later trade that balance for something else they want. The database itself isn't what gives the balances value, it's people's willingness to trade.
This is the same thing which gives precious metals most of their value - willingness to trade other things for them. If it were not for that, they would only have "use value" as industrial commodities. There is nothing wrong with precious metals, in fact bitcoin was designed to be similar. It was purposely made finite in quantity and hard to find, and the process of finding new coins is called "mining" by analogy to metals.
I got pizza delivered to the house the other night. It cost me 0.82 bitcoins. Pizza Hut got it there in about 35 minutes.
Of course, Pizza Hut doesn't support using bitcoins directly, but there is a proxy to make it happen... pizzaforcoins.com
Incidentally, the first well documented purchase of anything real using bitcoins was also purchasing pizza (years ago).. The purchaser spent 10,000 BTC to have 2 pizzas delivered. Later after the price of Bitcoin had shot way up, a journalist asked him if he regretted that.. He said something like "no way.. it was *REALLY* good pizza" (that he spent the then equivalent of $300,000 on).
Examples of data would be: 5, $, B, T, C. Meaningless values. 5 of what? How much IS 5? What does $ signify? Or B?
Examples of information would be: $5, BTC5 - data encoded with meaning. 5 dollars. 5 BitCoins.
KNOWING which one of those is worth more would be knowledge.
Wisdom would be using that knowledge to achieve something. Some form of advantage or additional value.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_Pyramid
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The same can be said for any tangible good, from cars, food, baseball cards and the computer device you're touching right now, to oil, gold, and money itself. The value of a thing is exactly equal to the price someone is willing to pay you for it.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
No precedence required. You cant steal data that does not belong to you. Almost all photographs are completely digital now... you think that somehow there is no ownership because they lack the physical quality of pictures from the past? And accessing a website using fake credentials to access someone elses account is illegal in most countries and further it specifically breaks the user agreement for site usage. This was obviously a crime and there is no need to prove whether bitcoins have dollar value or not. If caught and prosecuted, any ruling would require the bitcoins to be returned (I assume). Which would effectively return the value to the owner regardless of whether or not the courts recognize this as currency.
If someone discovers your bitcoin wallet private key, your bitcoins will now be stolen and are no longer available to you.
yes you still have your bitcoin wallet private key, but now it's useless because there are no more bitcoins that can be transferred with that private key. I am not saying *all* data can be stolen. I am saying that bitcoin wallet private keys are special in that they behave like real property. They really do stop working correctly once someone else knows them, just like how your car doesn't get you places anymore once someone else has it.