“It’s one of the broadest and most complex cryptocurrency investigations I’ve ever seen,” Bax said. Unciphered works with both cryptocurrency theft victims and clients who seek the company’s expertise in probate proceedings, which involves being hired by the family of a recently deceased person to discover the crypto seed phrase that unlocks a potentially huge inheritance for surviving family members.īax said he closely reviewed the massive trove of cryptocurrency theft data that Taylor Monahan and others have collected and linked together. “If you have my seed phrase, you can copy and paste that into your wallet, and then you can see all my accounts. “The seed phrase is literally the money,” said Nick Bax, director of analytics at Unciphered, a cryptocurrency wallet recovery company. Which is why the best practice for many cybersecurity enthusiasts has long been to store their seed phrases either in some type of encrypted container - such as a password manager - or else inside an offline, special-purpose hardware encryption device, such as a Trezor or Ledger wallet. Image: /tayvanoĪrmed with your secret seed phrase, anyone can instantly access all of the cryptocurrency holdings tied to that cryptographic key, and move the funds to anywhere they like. MetaMask owner Taylor Monahan on Twitter. 28, Monahan said she’d concluded that the common thread among nearly every victim was that they’d previously used LastPass to store their “seed phrase,” the private key needed to unlock access to their cryptocurrency investments. Monahan has been documenting the crypto thefts via Twitter/X since March 2023, frequently expressing frustration in the search for a common cause among the victims. They are also deeply integrated into this ecosystem, employees of reputable crypto orgs, VCs, people who built DeFi protocols, deploy contracts, run full nodes.” “The victim profile remains the most striking thing,” Monahan wrote. Importantly, none appeared to have suffered the sorts of attacks that typically preface a high-dollar crypto heist, such as the compromise of one’s email and/or mobile phone accounts. Monahan said virtually all of the victims she has assisted were longtime cryptocurrency investors, and security-minded individuals. Since late December 2022, Monahan and other researchers have identified a highly reliable set of clues that they say connect recent thefts targeting more than 150 people, Collectively, these individuals have been robbed of more than $35 million worth of crypto. Taylor Monahan is founder and CEO of MetaMask, a popular software cryptocurrency wallet used to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting security-conscious people throughout the tech industry has led some security experts to conclude that crooks likely have succeeded at cracking open some of the stolen LastPass vaults. In November 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users.
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