I'm guessing they brute forced into his laptop (or used a windows exploit or something) and opened up the program to find the cold wallet addresses (which is amazing they didn't have elsewhere) and then found them to be empty. Even if they didn't have the private keys, they'd just need the address to discover the balance. Though, the keys were also probably on the laptop.
I don’t know about now, but in the past accessing an account was as easy as resetting the password in safe mode. I have done this numerous times when I worked in IT for people who forgot their passwords. It was such a stupid simple workaround. It wouldn’t surprise me if such workarounds still exist in win 10 and previous.
Maybe there's an exploit with the hardware or operating system that is not known to the standard population, but is known by the government, hardware/OS manufacturer and black hat/white hat crackers.
Based on what I've read, the NSA and other white-hat organizations have access to 0-days or have discovered 0-days that can crack these things but they're not released to the public or if they are, they're released years later.
Why would it? If no one else knows the password, just say it was a weak password (or even that you got lucky). There's $137m missing, so clearly something went wrong - one more mistake wouldn't be hard to believe. Even if it does, does it matter? "There's a vulnerability in <OS>" is not exactly news or useful.
0days are not magic. Stare enough at code and you will find them. E&Y and the other Professional Services companies have a big pentesting team, and they would have made discoveries on their own regarding system security. Any company with a large security / research team would have 0days. What they do with them, (report, sit, burn, etc) is up the organizational and individual ethics of the operator.
Because 0-days are accessible to anyone with money. And Ernst and Young would have a ton of money, and plenty of opportunities where clients would come to them and hire them privately about issues like this.
Coming up with 0-days is moderately hard with your own cracking team. Buying them is an easy thing to do.
Ultimately, that's what 0-days are for in the wider market. You find one and sell it.
Ernst and Young are huge and do a lot of very sophisticated forensic accounting work. If they don't have people in house, they almost certainly have the phone number to someone who does.
The NSA wears two hats, one for each head. [0] The white hat secures government communication, prevents industrial espionage, hardens national infrastructure and collaborates on FIPS and other standards. The black hat eavesdrops on foreign government communication, conducts mass surveillance, hacks national infrastructure and backdoors FIPS and other standards.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#Missi...NSA's eavesdropping mission includes radio broadcasting, both from various organizations and individuals, the Internet, telephone calls, and other intercepted forms of communication. Its secure communications mission includes military, diplomatic, and all other sensitive, confidential or secret government communications.[51]
