Quote from: banned_but_not_out on February 16, 2015, 10:51:31 PM

Quote from: Rent_a_Ray on February 16, 2015, 07:11:53 PM

Quote from: a_cat_named_joe on February 15, 2015, 04:50:43 PM

Just saw the news about BTER. Seems I took a hit. I hope not too many others were affected. We were warned. Here's the latest on what BTER have to say on their website :-

7170 BTC got stolen from our cold wallet in this transaction:

https://blockchain.info/tx/f5b0363f03e1ed8bb812c135361ea93590c831ce9f13a3750be1b93575baccc6

720 BTC bounty for chasing it back.

All wallets have been shut down and withdrawals of the unaffected coins will be arranged later.

BTER.com
Email:support@mail.bter.com
Phone:400-0070-955
QQ: 4000070955

Question 1: If it's a cold wallet, how can the coins be stolen?

Question 2: Are we fated in that just as we get to the top of a coin vote poll, the exchange closes down!? We were at least 8th out of 256 and rising faster than all the other coins on BTER.

Q1: Inside job. If you have the private key everything is possible. Cold storage isn't a solution. Thief can import the key --> the wallet is hot.
Different scenario: Bruteforcing with vanitygen, high calculation power and a lot of luck. (watch my signature - It took ~10 Minutes with an old AMD card.)

There are some webpages with thousands of random-generated keypairs - If a key matches with an existing key (let's say the thief is monitoring all accounts >1000 BTC against his database) he would be the winner. And the next question could be: Is "thief" the right term then? (I don't know how key generation in Bitcoin core works, but if it works with a system time randomizer, you could try to generate addresses with a manipulated system time. But that's only a thought.)

A "good" key generation could be: Mouse moving + personal message + systime + actual CPU temperature + ID of the third process in your taskmanager + hash of the current block.

Had too much beer today.

Cheers,
Ray

You're alright. Everyone deserves a drink every now and then. In fact have another. I have a question to ask you.

Say a large number of Bitcoins went missing at a big exchange and you had the blockchain info, how would you 'chase it back' so that the person responsible would be identified and the coins recovered?

Let's pluck a random figure out of the air ... completely out of the blue ... say 7170 BTC for instance ... and the blockchain info was ... hmmmm, let me think ... let's say:-

https://blockchain.info/tx/f5b0363f03e1ed8bb812c135361ea93590c831ce9f13a3750be1b93575baccc6

Purely hypothetical of course, but how would you do it? Now take your time ... nice and slow, while I take notes ...

The thief will get 720 BTC bounty for sending the stolen coins (-10%) back.
No tracing, no fear, no lawsuits and no hitmen - everyone is happy with the solution and the thief would become a hero.

It isn't easy to change 7170 BTC into bucks without exposing your identity, am I right?

Cheers