domains FBI pierces ‘anonymity’ of cryptocurrency, secret domain registrars

[Lox]

The US Justice Department on Wednesday announced the arrest of five suspected members of the notorious Scattered Spider phishing crew, but the most interesting part of the case was a US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) document detailing how easily the feds were able to track the phishers’ movements and activities.

In recent years, services that push anonymous communications and transactions, including through cryptocurrencies, free and disposable email addresses, and services that register domains to shield the actual owners’ identities, have soared in popularity, worrying many in the CISO community.

But the newly-published FBI investigation details show that these services don’t deliver anonymization or secrecy as much as they make the information time-consuming, expensive, and cumbersome to track. In short, they don’t shield identities. They simply make it a hassle to unearth those identities.

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[Kyle Tully]

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This is like a playbook of anti-opsec