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Former Hacking Team Members Are Now Spying on the Blockchain for Coinbase (vice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week, cryptocurrency industry giant Coinbase sparked outrage when it announced that it had purchased a small startup called Neutrino. Normally, such an acquisition wouldn't make many waves, but Neutrino isn't your average startup. The company was founded by three former employees of Hacking Team, a controversial Italian surveillance vendor that was caught several times selling spyware to governments with dubious human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. Neutrino develops technology for law enforcement and financial institutions to investigate and track transactions on the blockchain, the shared public ledger that tracks the movement of tokens in the ecosystem. Coinbase is one of the largest platforms for buying and selling cryptocurrencies in the world, so it sees a lot of transactions on its exchange.
The company claims to be able to monitor and track not just Bitcoin -- a relatively straightforward endeavor -- but also supposedly privacy-oriented (and harder to track) coins such as Monero. In 2017, the company was able to conclude that the North Korean hackers behind the destructive ransomware WannaCry cashed out their Bitcoin and turned it into Monero. [...] In a statement to Motherboard, a Coinbase spokesperson said that the company "does not condone nor will it defend the actions of Hacking Team." "We are aware that Neutrino's co-founders previously worked at Hacking Team, which we reviewed as part of our security, technical, and hiring diligence," the spokesperson said. But Neutrino's technology was just too important for Coinbase to pass on, the spokesperson explained.
The company claims to be able to monitor and track not just Bitcoin -- a relatively straightforward endeavor -- but also supposedly privacy-oriented (and harder to track) coins such as Monero. In 2017, the company was able to conclude that the North Korean hackers behind the destructive ransomware WannaCry cashed out their Bitcoin and turned it into Monero. [...] In a statement to Motherboard, a Coinbase spokesperson said that the company "does not condone nor will it defend the actions of Hacking Team." "We are aware that Neutrino's co-founders previously worked at Hacking Team, which we reviewed as part of our security, technical, and hiring diligence," the spokesperson said. But Neutrino's technology was just too important for Coinbase to pass on, the spokesperson explained.
If Monero can be tracked, then the tracker is not evil. It means Monero's so called privacy orientation sucks and that the coin is crap.
You may have moral objections to this point of view, but face it: This is the world we live in. Privacy is not something that is given, privacy is something that you have to take. Just like freedom.
That was my thoughts exactly. Show me how they can see the new wallet addresses created. And where that leads to. Chances are slim.
Yea Oracle, Google and Microsoft!
Except they didn't track anything. They tracked them turning bitcoin into monero. There was no more tracking after that. Clickbait buillshit. Isn't that why we come to Slashdot?
Undoubtedly Neutrino are only able to denonymise sloppy XMR users. If the XMR is converted using correct opsec (use Tor, crypto -> XMR at non-KYC exchange, run monerod, download entire XMR blockchain, run full node, split many transactions between many wallets offline), then output is mathematically unrelated to input. Only timing attacks remain, which can be mitigated against.