Finnish authorities traced Monero transactions tied to Vastaamo hack

[Baofeng]

Does anyone here heard about this news on Monero?

Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation reportedly tracked Monero transactions as part of an investigation over Julius Aleksanteri Kivimäki’s criminal trial. Kivimäki is accused of hacking a private mental health firm’s database and demanding ransom payments in cryptocurrencies.

According to local media reports, prosecutors dropped new evidence on Jan. 22 showing a crypto trail leading to Kivimäki’s bank account. In October 2022, the hacker allegedly demanded 40 Bitcoin BTC in exchange for not publishing records of over 33,000 patients from psychotherapy service provider Vastaamo.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/finnish-authorities-traced-monero-vastaamo-hack

Or it is just the hacker made a lot of error and slip up that's why the authorities were able to track him as he uses a CEX and Binance help the authorities and provided the needed info that's why they caugh him.

[Zed0X]

It looks like another clickbait article. My guess is that they never really cracked the Monero code but the hacker made a huge blunder. He used centralized exchange twice with the same email that authorities got from Binance. I think that is what really  pinned him down.

[ABCbits]

When the ransom was not paid, Kivimäki allegedly proceeded to target individual patients. As per the Finnish police, the hacker received payments in Bitcoin and sent the funds to an exchange that was not compliant with Know Your Customer (KYC) guidelines before swapping for Monero and then transferring the funds to a dedicated Monero wallet.

According to reports, the funds were later sent to Binance, exchanged for Bitcoin again, and moved to different wallets. The local authorities are maintaining confidentiality and have not disclosed any further details about their on-chain analysis.

Good thing the criminal is stupid enough to use centralized exchange. Anyway, i'd guess they know amount sent by individual patient and ask exchange whether they receive Monero deposit with certain value range.

[Baofeng]

It looks like another clickbait article. My guess is that they never really cracked the Monero code but the hacker made a huge blunder. He used centralized exchange twice with the same email that authorities got from Binance. I think that is what really  pinned him down.

This is also what I expected, we all know how crypto media or journalism is.

But in any case, for me Monero is still ahead of the game as far as privacy coins goes and it's not that easy to break it. I remember some US agency offered monetary rewards on how to break Monero's code but so far no one has claim to that bounty money yet.