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.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    82
    ·
    edit-2
    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.

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      1 month ago

      The shopping list on the suspect’s fridge apparently required

      • Nebula
      • Tangle
      • Horse
      • Piper
      • Green
      • Sharp

      Our technician called Coles and Woolies, who confirm these are not regular grocery items, and then he had a lightbulb moment: Beat the suspect with an extension cord until he gave up the seed phrase

    • muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 month ago

      I wrote a script to generate seed phrases and look up if that derived into a key with any value. Then did the maths on how impossible that is and decided to stop.

    • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 month ago

      I mean if someone comes into your house with a clipboard and safety vest and a gun your probably going to let them do what they need if you can’t fight them off.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 month ago

      “Twenty or thirty years ago, police did not hack

      Can confirm this is totally untrue. None of my in-laws would say either way, but for sure they wouldn’t NOT say either way, if that makes sense.