𝗛𝗢𝗪 𝗗𝗢 𝗬𝗢𝗨 𝗛𝗔𝗖𝗞 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗚𝗢𝗡 𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝗚𝗘𝗧 𝗖𝗔𝗨𝗚𝗛𝗧 𝗕𝗬 𝗔 $𝟮𝟱𝟬 𝗧𝗥𝗔𝗡𝗦𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡.
– Kai West was 25, British, and running the dark web's biggest stolen data marketplace under the name IntelBroker
– His victim list reads like a who's who. Apple. AMD. Cisco. Nokia. General Electric. Europol. The US Pentagon.
– And a database containing the personal information of every member of the US Congress.
– He sold everything in Monero only. Untraceable by design. For 2 years nobody could touch him.
– Then in January 2023 an FBI agent reached out to buy $250 worth of stolen data and talked him into accepting Bitcoin just this once
– That $250 went into a wallet tied to his real Coinbase account. Registered with his actual UK driver's license. His real name and his real face.
– The FBI spent the next 2 years quietly building the case. Matching his YouTube watch history to posts on his hacker forum. Piecing everything together.
– He even had a fake LinkedIn saying he worked at the UK equivalent of the FBI. They publicly said they had never heard of him.
– In January 2025 he stepped down from running the forum. Said he was "too busy."
– He was arrested in France 3 weeks later.
– $25 million in damage. 40+ companies. 2 years of running the biggest stolen data operation on the dark web.
Brought down by $250 and one moment of trusting the wrong coin.
The most untraceable hacker on the internet forgot that Coinbase needs your ID.
WireGuard has some big updates ready to go on Windows, our first on the platform in nearly 4 years. We've done some nice modernizations and improvements, fixed bugs, added features, updated the toolchain, and more. But our release is currently blocked by @Microsoft.
The recent thread on Hacker News encouraged me to write this up, rather than just grumbling to myself privately about it as I have the last two weeks.
I logged in to get the WireGuardNT driver signed -- a necessary step for driver authors -- and was greeted by this vague message that the account has been suspended. Looking further into it, it seems like they instituted an identity verification policy, didn't notify me about it, and then I guess they suspended accounts who didn't do the verification. So of course I did the ID card verification immediately, but now an appeal is necessary. The appeals process requires filing a support ticket, but filing a support ticket requires a non-suspended account... Catch-22, eventually resolved by filing one through Azure and getting it rerouted to the right department. That was two weeks ago. Now they've told me there's a 60 day appeal review period. Wish us luck!
It's a little crazy, because what if there was some critical ring 0 RCE vuln that was being exploited in the wild and that needed to be patched immediately? (Just hypothetical; there isn't.) In that case, telling users "sorry, you've got to wait 60 days" would be sort of bad. And users of WireGuard for Windows are also Microsoft Windows users, so I can't see how this is good for Microsoft either. I think it must just be a case of bureaucracy gone slightly off the rails. Happens.
If any Microsofters are able to make this take not-sixty-days, please do get in touch.
Those Artemis images look beautiful and all, but they were photoshopped. The images of the moon were flattened. There are deep structures on the moon. But people would never know because Nasa is still lying to us about life outside of earth.