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Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram System Modeler trial. Bowling is a simple game that consists of a ball, 10 pins and a lane. You take the ball, come to the starting line, aim between pins 1 and 3 and throw the ball. You instinctively assume that the ball and the lane are perfect and expect the ball to go straight where you aimed.
After a few months of brainstorming ideas, developing notebooks and scripts and refining videos through several rounds of editing and refilming, we are pleased to announce that the Visual Explorations in Data Science massive open online course (MOOC) is now available.
On June 7, the FBI seized 63.7 bitcoin (BTC), approximately $2.3 million USD, from one of the addresses to which DarkSide’s cluster, described in my earlier post, sent their ransom funds. Normally, this should have been inaccessible to anyone without a private key for that address. The FBI apparently managed, however, to obtain one.
Let me tell you a story about how to trace Russian hackers’ cryptocurrency funds using only public knowledge, some educated guesses and the Wolfram Language.
But first, a little background information.In 2020, Melbourne, Australia, had a 112-day lockdown of the entire city to help stop the spread of COVID-19. The wearing of masks was mandatory and we were limited to one hour a day of outside activity. Otherwise, we were stuck in our homes. This gave me lots of time to look into interesting problems I’d been putting off for years.
I was inspired by a YouTube video by David Oranchak, which looked at the Zodiac Killer’s 340-character cipher (Z340), which is pictured below. This cipher is considered one of the holy grails of cryptography, as at the time the cipher had resisted attacks for 50 years, so any attempts to find a solution were truly a moonshot.