[VonBlue]

Hold on... how could they have de-anonymized the blockchain transactions? That seems.. false

[tomc1985]

Why not? People link their wallets to other wallets and financial services with reporting requirements all the time. Bitcoin isn't anonymous

[Rebelgecko]

All transactions are public on the Bitcoin blockchain. I haven't followed the wallets, but it's possible that they tried to cash out on an exchange and got caught. Or they were initially found via other means and a search of their computers found the corresponding wallet.dat files.

[banana_giraffe]

Yeah, they used Coinbase, and Coinbase is of course willing to respond to warrants.

[techntoke]

Which would likely be encrypted

[Aaronstotle]

Bitcoin is a public blockchain, there are various blockchain analytic firms such as Elliptic/Chainalysis that offer bitcoin tracing services.

Bitcoin is not private nor anonymous, the rise of blockchain surveillance is why privacy coins like Monero are gaining in popularity.

That being said, I'm sure it wasn't solely BTC transactions, these guys seemed to have very poor op-sec for performing such a big hack.

[cyral]

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/press-release/file/1300126...

It’s detailed here, very interesting read

[ChrisLomont]

It’s routinely done by researchers.

Here’s a lot of papers on it.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,15&q=bitco...