> The transfers represented payments made by Colonial that had been transferred to an "address" whose password or "private key" was known to the FBI, which then recovered the money.
It would be interesting to hear some speculation from Hacker News readers about how they could have done this.
Yeah, to be honest this seems suspicious. Either it is inaccurate reporting, or there is something potentially fishy going on. List of possibilities in no particular order:
* The "hack" was all done by the FBI as a false flag operation
* The FBI has access to encryption backdoors used in some blockchains
* The DarkSide group re-used previously cracked keys with their wallet (I'm not sure this is even possible with any crypto, but throwing it out there as a maybe)
* The FBI hacked into computers owned by DarkSide and obtained the private key from them
* The FBI controls more than 51% of hashing power for the crypto used here, and transferred the coins to their own wallet using a 51% attack
It would be interesting to hear some speculation from Hacker News readers about how they could have done this.