Cryptocurrency Transactions May Uncover Sales of Shadow Broker with Hacking Tools

Regardless of the Shadow Brokers told users to take advantage of privacy-focused crypto coins Zcash, with researchers who may have found new proof of who attempted to purchase new group wares.

During the year of 2016, there was a whole group of self-proclaimed hackers who have recently started releasing a newly developed code stolen from the NSA. Some of it was involved with dumping some tools for hacking that could be used for the purpose of exploiting previously performed ransomware attacks. The ransom attacks b WannaCry where also known as shadow brokers who then listed more tools on a dedicated shop built online for a “monthly dump service” to access additional codes for development.

There was even a team from a London based college of researchers that found evidence of payments for those alleged exploits through the process of examining transactions made in the altcoin Zcash. It is a privacy operated crypto coin group that the alleged Shadow Brokers needed for using with potential customers who needed to use it while at the same time tracing the movement of some of the tokens to exact altcoin exchanges.

Th newly published paper was printed on the arxiv preprint server in the month of May as well as shown in the previous week of the very first Zcash conference held in Canada’s Montreal. It highlights many of the different techniques used to help verify the identity of Zcash users, plus at the same time shows investigators how they can follow a trail of other related Shadow Brokers who potentially purchased tools in the United States.

“We routinely receive legal process from law enforcement agents and regulators conducting investigations. It is our policy not to comment on any such requests,”

spoke a representative of Bitfinex, the altcoin exchange platform used by most researchers that was tied to other possible shadow broker-related transactions, was said to Motherboard in an announcement.

The group who invested the zone on a number of various transactions that were made in the same amount the Shadow Brokers requested were also made at the same time frame with another sales group that opened up as well. Specifically, the researchers also noticed a specific selection of transactions that could be considered normal customers according to the papers.

“The idea is that based on the timings and amounts of the transactions (and other metadata about the cluster sending them), there is some reasonable chance this reflects someone sending money to the Shadow Brokers,”

Sarah Meiklejohn, a member of the UCL team behind the research, stated to Motherboard in an email. Specifically, the researchers identified a June transaction for 100 ZEC, one in July for 200 ZEC, and another in August for 500 ZEC, “matching TSB [The Shadow Brokers] prices exactly,” the paper reads.

“The cluster belonged to a new user, and most of the money in this user’s cluster came directly from Bitfinex,” also added the paper.