Over the last day or so word has come out how the FBI was able to recover almost 64 of the 75 Bitcoin paid to DarkSide by Colonial Pipeline. When news of this came out people immediately linked it to the FBI "hacking" the Bitcoin Network however this was far from the case. I want to first say that I am no expert in this field however I am also no novice when it come to how things like this function and especially the governments actions within this particular incident.
People seem to have forgotten some pretty basic things when it comes to crypto and Bitcoin and that is the public distributed ledger. The FBI without clearly stating it highly hinted at the fact they just tracked the coins that were sent and bam they found a wallet that held the coins sent. Now it would be safe to assume that they have some high powered sleuthing stuff here as I would assume the coins where at one point sent to a Bitcoin mixer to try and hide them with "clean" coins not linked to the hack. This is not a fool proof method though and Bitcoins have been tracked through these means before.
Further backing how there was no hack was the very fact that in an article I wrote a few weeks ago after the attack DarkSide itself "shut down" due to losing infrastructure it needed. With the FBI warrant that means they found some link to U.S. based services and this could be what DarkSide was talking about when it made its comments before going offline. One has to remember that if you use any US based service be it an ISP, VPN, or even just an American made/sold computer the FBI has the ability to get warrants for access to your stuff.
So why after all of this would I say that the FBI recovery was good? Well it further throws back the idea that Bitcoin and crypto is heavily used for criminal endeavors. After all if the FBI can track down the funds like this what is the difference then using any other currency in the world? With what has come out and how the FBI was able to do this as quickly as they did to me just shows how much more public the blockchain is and how it really is criminally speaking no different then the USD. In fact you could argue that due to the public ledger that it is more transparent then the USD!
With the FBI being able to recover such a large amount of the Bitcoin I also believe that future ransomware attackers will be much more careful in using Bitcoin and crypto to get their payments. Now I have no idea what they would go to but if you spend all of this time and energy and then lose almost 85% of the ransom you got you have to think twice before using the method again. With so much vital internet infrastructure in the US or at some point touching the US law enforcement will be able to get these warrants to track down people who use it for nefarious reasons.
