I'm All Up in your Blockchain, Hunting Down the Nazis

Presented at THOTCON 0x9 (2018), May 5, 2018, noon (50 minutes).

In the wake of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and the car attack in the aftermath, normal people wondered what is behind the resurgence of racial extremism. In looking at some of the figureheads of this movement, it was immediately apparent that several fund their operations with bitcoin with several holding thousands of dollars and a few holding millions (as of today's exchange rate). This talk will cover the research efforts into figuring out the adversaries behind the white supremacist movement, who is funding them, and the results of publishing their transactions on a live twitter feed at @neonaziwallets. We will show how they are getting their big money and what can be done to disrupt their activities. This talk will also cover an open-source twitter bot script that can monitor transactions to defined wallets and demonstrate how various exchanges leak information that allow visibility into other altcoins, particularly monero.


Presenters:

  • John Bambenek
    John Bambenek is VP of Research and Intelligence at ThreatSTOP where he manages the miscreant punching division of the company. He is also a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has developed a variety of open-source tools and feeds that provide surveillance of malicious activity and regularly assists law enforcement and others to track down bad people for prosecution. He hates Illinois Nazis and started posting their financial transactions on twitter. Hilarity ensued.

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