The chief executive officer of Blockstream, Adam Back, has taken to Twitter to dispel the news that the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice were able to hack the Bitcoin wallet of the DarkSide hacking group to recover $2.3 million worth of Bitcoin out of the $4.3 million paid to the ransomware hackers.
He insists that the agencies recovered the money without hacking the wallet since it is not possible.
No bitcoin wallet was hacked, nor is even known to be possible.
Back shared that the hackers had rented a cloud server to hold the BTC they had received as ransom after the attack on the Colonial Pipeline (a key East Coast pipeline) that took place in May.
The FBI and DoJ took control of the server and seized the coins.
Ransom hackers used a rented cloud server. FBI got a subpoena and took control of it and recovered coins. That's it.
Adam Back also shared the technical details of this.
The news triggered another Bitcoin price fall, pushing it down to the $32,000 area: the third-lowest level in the past month.
At press time, the flagship digital currency is striving to recover the losses, trading at $32,911, as per data provided by CoinMarketCap.
Vladislav Sopov
Dan Burgin