JOHOE SPEAKS ON AIR ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN.INFO BREACH

On the same day as CCN’s recent interview with ‘white hat’ hacker ‘Johoe’ (self-pronounced as ‘Yo-hew’), the German security researcher decided to speak out, literally, on Let’s Talk Bitcoin’s show The Bitcoin Game episode #7. Is this the Bitcoin community’s version of a media tour? In the 43-minute program, Jochen (the hacker’s real first name) covers a lot of ground, from how he got involved with Bitcoin to how he initially discovered a flaw.
Who is Johoe?
As it turns out, Johoe is a computer science researcher at a German university. If anyone is looking to figure out who the actual man behind the ‘heroic’ act is, this tidbit narrows down the search. While the whole event seems laudable and should be restorative of our faith in humanity, we have to ask ourselves what would drive someone to steal (or rescue, depending on how you look at it) over $200,000 worth of bitcoins in the first place, and then what drove him to return them.
I watched this problem closely in the last days because there was another application doing similar things […] yes, I found a new key a week or something like that. So, I made it a habit to look after it every day, and this [one] morning I found these 500 new weak keys, so I knew there was a problem here. […] In this commit, the developer wrote what the problem was […] this was my starting point. […] It was clear that if I know the random numbers, then I could basically generate them myself. […] The main motivation was the technical part.

This post was published at Crypto Coins News on December 23, 2014.