Bitcoins Tied to Colonial Pipeline Hack Are on the Move Again

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Alex Dovb­nya

Ellip­tic sug­gests that some­one is laun­der­ing funds tied to Dark­Side ran­somware group

Accord­ing to a blog post pub­lished by blockchain foren­sics firm Ellip­tic, mil­lions worth of Bit­coin tied to the infa­mous Colo­nial Pipeline hack have moved for the first time in over five months.

As report­ed by U.Today, Colo­nial Pipeline paid a $5 mil­lion ran­som in Bit­coin after a cyber­at­tack con­duct­ed by the Dark­Side hack­ing group dis­rupt­ed the East Coast’s fuel delivery.

In a stun­ning twist, the Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion (FBI) then moved to con­fis­cate $2.3 mil­lion in Bit­coin that was paid to the hack­ers in June.

In May, Dark­Side’s servers had been seized along with their cryp­to hold­ings, with some sug­gest­ing that the shut­down could be an exit scam.

On the day Dark­Side alleged­ly halt­ed its oper­a­tions, $7 mil­lion worth of Bit­coin was trans­ferred to anoth­er wallet.

After five months of inac­tiv­i­ty, the funds are now being sent to dif­fer­ent wal­lets. Accord­ing to Ellip­tic, this is a pop­u­lar way of laun­der­ing mon­ey. Some of these coins have already end­ed up on cryp­to exchanges:

This is a com­mon mon­ey laun­der­ing tech­nique, used to attempt to make the funds more dif­fi­cult to track and to aid their con­ver­sion into fiat cur­ren­cy through exchanges.

Ear­li­er this week, REvil, the asso­ciates of the Dark­Side gang, went dark as a result of a com­plex oper­a­tion con­duct­ed by glob­al governments.

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