Chinese mining pool LuBian was hacked in 2020 for 127,426 Bitcoin (BTC), valued at about $3.5 billion on the time, making it the most important crypto hack in historical past, in response to blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence.
The platform retroactively uncovered the heist on Saturday, claiming that LuBian, which emerged because the sixth-largest BTC mining pool on the time, was first hacked on December 28, 2020.
About 90% of the pool’s BTC was stolen by the risk actor earlier than LuBian was in a position to transfer its remaining 11,886 BTC to restoration wallets. Neither the platform nor the hacker publicized the assault on the time, the intelligence platform stated.
The mining pool embedded an OP_RETURN message to every of the pockets addresses belonging to the hacker in 1,516 completely different messages, which price it about 1.4 BTC. Arkham’s staff additionally wrote:
“It seems that LuBian was utilizing an algorithm to generate its personal keys that was prone to brute-force assaults. This could have been the vulnerability exploited by the hackers.”
The stolen Bitcoin is now price about $14.5 billion at present costs, and the assault highlights the necessity for crypto customers to observe proactive security measures and personal key administration, counting on solely essentially the most strong random quantity mills to create keys.
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LuBian hack tops the ByBit hack and different notorious crypto heists
In February, the ByBit trade was hacked for $1.5 billion and the assault was reported as the only greatest crypto hack in historical past on the time.
The ByBit assault was attributed to a compromised SafeWallet developer machine, in response to a autopsy report from SafeWallet and cybersecurity agency Mandiant.
These hackers probably exploited the developer’s machine by putting in malware on the system after which utilizing that developer’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) tokens whereas the developer was on-line and lively.
This allowed the hackers to entry delicate techniques with out setting off any alarm bells or triggering a response from the staff.
In April, an aged particular person misplaced $330 million in Bitcoin via a social engineering assault, which was laundered via 300 completely different pockets addresses.
The BTC heist was thought-about the fifth-largest crypto heist in historical past on the time, and solely $7 million of the $330 million was frozen within the speedy wake of the assault.
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