The ransom money from the most recent ‘pseudo-Petya’ cyberattack is the subject of a detective diagram attempting to follow it.
The image, created and uploaded by Quartz Monday, attempts to make sense of where the $10,000 paid to hackers went after it moved from its reception wallet July 4.
“If we knew what Bitcoin address or addresses the Petya/NotPetya money ended up in, we’d likely find hundreds of thousands of transactions between that address and the starting address,” the publication explains.
“That’s more than we could ever chart, but if we could, many paths would flow out from the center as they do in the diagram…”
Nature of the attack
There has been increasing debate over the nature of the cyberattack, which appeared to exactly copy the style of the earlier WannaCry ransomware affecting computers throughout the world.
Researchers quickly realized however that, contrary to indications the virus was a reincarnation of the separate Petya, this latest attack is something entirely new.
The ransomware aspect appeared to be a sideline, with fears raised that infected devices would simply have all their data wiped.
Nonetheless, the hacking scam only collected a modest amount of money, which made its way through coin mixers and is now all but untraceable in real life, Quartz notes.
Current analysis of the reception wallet shows a balance of just zero BTC with just over four BTC transacted.