Bitcoin seized by DOJ - Network is not compromised, but many other pain points are!
RT reports that the US DOJ has managed to recover some of that ransom that Colonial Pipeline paid to get their pipeline back:
The US Department of Justice has managed to track down and recapture 63.7 bitcoin worth of ransom from a wallet allegedly used by hackers who extorted Colonial Pipeline. The ransomware attack had caused widespread gas shortages.
With cooperation from Colonial, the DOJ got a warrant in a federal court in California and successfully “found and recaptured the majority of the ransom” from a bitcoin wallet, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced on Monday. It was the first seizure of this kind ever, she said.
Colonial’s CEO admitted last month the company had paid a ransom in cryptocurrency – estimated at $4.4 million at the time – and argued “it was the right thing to do for the country.”
— https://www.rt.com/usa/525937-doj-bitcoin-colonial-pipeline-ransom
So the ransom was paid in virtual money that doesn’t exist.
Ransomware is the new cool word. In fact totally private, grass-roots, guerrilla, anonymous hackers are on a roll now. They could shut down the whole country, it seems.
The “iConstituent” voter roll software is under ransomeware attack. That’s the software that holds the information on all the voters of one state, party affiliation, address, name. The state government will have to cough up some bitcoin ransom, I guess, to pay off some mysterious totally private hackers because the FBI is so busy persecuting Trump supporters that they can’t spare the resources to catch these cyber criminals. The FBI can steal their virtual wallets but they can’t catch the people it seems.
Did you guys hear? The FBI and the local police tricked organized criminals into using a secure encrypted chat app that they managed to un-encrypt and now they’ve rounded up dozens of these crooks. Where did the FBI do this crime fighting, you might ask? In Austria! The FBI works in Austria but not in the USA, seemingly.
What about the NSA? Aren’t they supposed to be the cyber experts? Aren’t they supposed to have Everything on Everybody?
James Clapper testified before Congress, swearing by the Dread River, the Oath the Gods Break Not (just kidding. He swore by that silly old US Constitution, the oath that “Intelligence Community” fat cats like him break all the time), that the NSA did not, does not , never would surveil and collect all the emails, phone texts and conversations on-line ever sent by every American citizen as well as VIPs in foreign parts. But it turned out that he – how shocking! – was a big fat liar. The NSA, 60% of whose Intelligence is collected by Booze Allan Hamilton by contract, surveils American citizens.
I recall a few weeks ago that a gentleman claiming to be a retired Intelligence guy now whistleblowing, and consequently broadcasting from a secure undisclosed location, gave us cranky old Trump supporters a dose of Hopium by telling us that Trump and the NSA had the goods on everybody from Prince Mohammed to Angela Merkel to Nancy Pelosi and Chucky Schumer and Joe Biden, and any time now would drop the hammer and hose out the Swamp.
He said he and his QAnon friends were keeping the Trump supporters from abandoning non-violence. And for the longest time I didn’t understand how that was an underhanded accusation that Trump supporters are armed violent revolutionaries barely being restrained from deserving all the persecution that the DOJ, FBI, and US Armed Forces can dish out.
Meanwhile the actual, non-virtual, violent insurrectionists, Antifa/BLM, are ever ready and ever not prosecuted much less persecuted by the FBI. And people who trust in the law and the Constitution will be urged by the Academic Left and the Alt-Right and the Mainstream alike to keep their powder dry until they are one by one led off in handcuffs, or so it seems to me.
The Biden administration has had 30 people in solitary confinement in DC ever since January 6 being tortured like Julian Assange and Maria Butina and even beaten (one man may lose his right eye from a beating by a very Woke prison guard) to extract false confessions. The FBI is persecuting people because they vote in person and are not algorithms. The Academic Left is persecuting people because they have pale skins and call themselves men and women and would like to be able to prevent their children from being sex changed. Congress puts a razor wire barricade around itself but offers no such protection to federal property in Portland or Minneapolis. The Mainstream is diligently harassing people who disagree with the Woke agendas of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Everybody is subject to being Cancelled – harried out of their homes and home towns, fired from their jobs, having their kids threatened – all the horrors suffered by all the people who came forward and signed affidavits and testified before the legislatures of Arizona, Georgia and Michigan that they had witnessed massive election fraud on November 3, 2020.
Everybody is under threat except for the totally anonymous hackers who can at their will shut down the energy supply, the food supply, the banking system, the electric grid and who knows what else. These shadowy people are not under any threat by the FBI or the NSA or the CIA that I can detect.
Who IS under threat? The law abiding citizens of the USA, who are desperately abiding by the law even as the law melts like an ice sculpture of the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July, these are the ones under threat and under lockdowns and under siege by scot-free criminals wherever Democrats rule their towns and states.