No One's Bidding on The Shadow Brokers' Stolen NSA Hacking Tools (vice.com)

That group auctioning the NSA's hacking tools is "very upset" no one's bidding on them. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Motherboard: "TheShadowBrokers" authored another bizarre rant expressing their annoyance at the seeming lack of interest in ponying up bitcoins to release their full set of stolen files. "Peoples is having interest in free files ... But people is no interest in #EQGRP_Auction," the mysterious hacker group complained in a ranting post on Medium, which seems to be purposely written in Borat-style broken English. "TheShadowBrokers is thinking this is information communication problem."

The message also blindly lashes out at hackers, foreign intelligence services, and basically anyone else who hasn't bid on the files... At the time of this writing, TheShadowBrokers have only received bids for a total of 1.76 bitcoins -- or about $1,082 -- far below the group's asking price of $1 million.
At least five transactions came from a prankster who was trying to Rickroll the group with bitcoin addresses containing the words "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Comments

Rickroll

[CODiNE]

I'm not familiar with bitcoin address generation. Can someone estimate the amount of computing power required to come up with those wallet addresses? Is this just a quick script that takes a minute at most or something like a hash collusion?

Re:In other words

[AHuxley]

Re: "Could be a honey pot"
Yes. Recall the watch on onion routing using XKeyscore.
"How the NSA Targets Tor Users" (July 4, 2014)
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
"... and logs the IP address of people searching for various other privacy and encryption software."
NSA classifies Linux Journal readers, Tor and Tails Linux users as "extremists" (July 4, 2014)
http://www.in.techspot.com/new...
"... program marks and tracks the IP addresses of those who search for..."