The Colonial hackers made a rookie Bitcoin mistake

Follow Us Get the newsletter This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a hot wallet of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. Today's Agenda The Colonial hackers played themselves. Joe Manchin might not be America's biggest problem. Private equity is having its biggest year ever. Tesla probably sold some Bitcoin. Even these hackers made mistakes. Photographer: Getty Images/Hulton Archive Noob Day Afternoon You might think holding America's biggest pipeline for ransom would take the skills of a Danny Ocean or at least a Michael Bolton. And the hackers who teamed up with Russia's DarkSide to take down Colonial Pipeline last month did manage the pipeline-shutting and ransom-collecting parts of their crime. Where they went wrong is in the hiding-the-Bitcoin-from-the-FBI part. Kind of an important part! They made the classic noob mistake, Tim Culpan explains, of stashing their ill-gotten crypto in a "hot" wallet, meaning it was connected to the internet, meaning some hacker from the FBI maybe hacked it away from them. DarkSide? More like DORKSide, am I right? (I'm not right. I'm just kidding. The customers were the noobs, not DarkSide. Please do not cyberpirate me because of a joke. I have a family.) But all's not well that ends well. These hackers will probably be smarter next time, for one thing. And many more billions of dollars are taken in ransomware attacks every year, most of which don't get fumbled back into the victims' hands. The Justice Department needs a well-funded task force of hackers, agents and lawyers dedicated to fighting cybercrime, Bloomberg's editorial board writes, a kind of Series-of-Tubes Untouchables. These criminals won't just catch themselves! Well, not always. Sponsored Content The power of PayPal online, now in person. PayPal gives your business a way to accept touch-free, in-person payments. Generate your QR code from the app, then display it on your device or print it out. No new equipment required. Download the app. Customer must have PayPal account and app to pay. PayPal He's Just One Manchin Half the country is mad at Senator Joe Manchin (D???-WV) because he refuses to provide the 50th vote Democrats need to kill the Senate filibuster and pass bills. So stuff like infrastructure spending, supported by the popularly elected president, the House and most of the country, goes to the Senate to die because of one guy. Except maybe this isn't quite the right way to look at it. Maybe the real problem is not one senator but the entire Senate. Or maybe it's not the whole Senate, but the Republican half of it, Jonathan Bernstein writes, which seems dedicated to obstruction. Manchin may be naive if he really thinks there are 10 GOP votes for the taking. But if there were, a lot of popular stuff could get done.  Another popular thing Manchin is blocking is the For the People Act, a bunch of voting-reform measures. Manchin calls it way too ambitious, and Robert George agrees. Dems should drop it and take Manchin up on his desire to simply restore the Voting Rights Act. That actually does have some GOP support. Or at least it did, until Mitch McConnell smothered it today.  Let's Not Party Like It's 2007! The year 2007 brought us great music and great movies, so it wasn't all bad. But it was also the year Crocs broke big because of Mario Batali, which, ugh. It was also the year just before the financial system went critical, so that whenever you hear the phrase "[THING] is the biggest since 2007," you get a little nervous. Govern yourself accordingly when you hear that private equity is having its biggest year since 2007 and is on pace to maybe double that year's deal record, writes Tara Lachapelle. Wafer-thin interest rates are behind this boom, so everything should be fine this time.   Telltale Charts Despite Elon Musk's tweet that one time suggesting Tesla had diamond hands when it came to Bitcoin, the company probably butter-handed some of the stuff in the latest quarter, writes Liam Denning. Bitcoin sales padded Tesla's bottom line in the first quarter. The way sales are going in the latest quarter, it will probably need another boost. Further Reading A communist's election win in Peru is bad news for its copper miners and suggests global post-pandemic discontent. — Clara Ferreira Marques  Brett Kavanaugh might have just hinted how he feels about Roe v. Wade. — Noah Feldman Strong teen hiring is a good sign for the underlying health of the labor market. — Conor Sen  The NBA and other leagues gamble with integrity when they embrace betting too much. — Tyler Cowen  MoviePass had a clever business model of hacking its own customers. — Matt Levine  Anthony Fauci's emails reveal nothing scandalous. — Faye Flam  ICYMI China is its own worst enemy. Everybody's quitting hotel and restaurant jobs. A Trump family impersonator was arrested for fraud. Kickers The FBI built a messaging app for criminals, who actually used it. (h/t Scott Kominers) Bugs might be conscious. Some people have clearer mind's eyes than others. A walk in nature is better for mood and focus than microdosing. Notes: Please send Martian watermelons and complaints to Mark Gongloff at mgongloff1@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.   Like Bloomberg Opinion Today? Subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. 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