Alleged Ghost app creator had millions in crypto, says AFP
www.abc.net.au
Australian Federal Police allege the creator of Ghost app, used by criminals for communications had amassed millions in cryptocurrency.

According to the article ‘the Australian Federal Police (AFP) will allege that an analytics specialist from the AFP’s Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce deciphered Mr Jung’s cryptocurrency account’s “seed phrase”.’

The word ‘decipher’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I’m wondering if they socially engineered or just found it written somewhere in the house?

Anyway, curious as to how they did it.

  • xantoxis@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    I highly doubt they did anything remotely like “hacking” the seed phrase. I don’t care for cryptocurrency, but I hate cop bullshit even more, so here’s my 2 cents.

    or just found it written somewhere in the house?

    this one.

    A seed phrase is just an encoding of a long binary number which can be used to derive the secret key. Trying all the possibilities probably isn’t possible, and I think it’s also unlikely that they found a way to weaken it. What they probably did is find it and type it in. They DID raid the dude’s house, where he was probably keeping a copy of it.

    “Twenty or thirty years ago, police did not hack, that was not a thing that they did, but that’s very much part of the bread and butter of a modern police force nowadays,” Mr Uren said.

    LMAO fuck off with this. I don’t doubt they have some tech guys on hand. I don’t think they have access to the quantum computer you’d need for this.