Former Hacking Team Members Are Now Spying on the Blockchain for Coinbase

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week, cryptocurrency industry giant Coinbase sparked outrage when it announced that it had purchased a small startup called Neutrino. Normally, such an acquisition wouldn't make many waves, but Neutrino isn't your average startup. The company was founded by three former employees of Hacking Team, a controversial Italian surveillance vendor that was caught several times selling spyware to governments with dubious human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. Neutrino develops technology for law enforcement and financial institutions to investigate and track transactions on the blockchain, the shared public ledger that tracks the movement of tokens in the ecosystem. Coinbase is one of the largest platforms for buying and selling cryptocurrencies in the world, so it sees a lot of transactions on its exchange.

The company claims to be able to monitor and track not just Bitcoin -- a relatively straightforward endeavor -- but also supposedly privacy-oriented (and harder to track) coins such as Monero. In 2017, the company was able to conclude that the North Korean hackers behind the destructive ransomware WannaCry cashed out their Bitcoin and turned it into Monero. In a statement to Motherboard, a Coinbase spokesperson said that the company 'does not condone nor will it defend the actions of Hacking Team.' 'We are aware that Neutrino's co-founders previously worked at Hacking Team, which we reviewed as part of our security, technical, and hiring diligence,' the spokesperson said. But Neutrino's technology was just too important for Coinbase to pass on, the spokesperson explained.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.