“Blockchain Bandit” Returns With $90M In Stolen Crypto
During a six-year theft spree, the hacker stole up to $90 million worth of crypto from wallets with weak private keys.
A hacker known as the “Blockchain Bandit” has finally woken up after six years of sleep and is now moving their stolen money.
Chainalysis says that about $90 million in cryptocurrency stolen by an attacker in a long series of “programmatic thefts” since 2016 has started to move around in the last week.
This was done by sending 51,000 Ether and Bitcoin worth about $90 million from the thief’s address to a new one. Noting chainalysis:
“We suspect that the bandit is moving their funds given the recent jump in prices.”
The hacker was called the “Blockchain Bandit” because he could use “Ethercombing” to empty Ethereum wallets with weak private keys.
Since the first attack six years ago, the “programmatic theft” method of the attacker has taken money from more than 10,000 wallets worldwide.
1/ ?$90M stolen funds on the move: After 6 years of hodling, the “Blockchain Bandit” has awoken. In this ? we cover how the Blockchain Bandit amassed this treasure trove and where the funds are currently held.
Blockchain Bandit had gotten almost 45,000 ETH by guessing these weak private keys.
A security analyst said that he discovered the hacker by accident when he looked into how private keys are made. At the time, he noticed that the hacker had set up a node to steal money automatically from addresses with weak keys.
Researchers found that 732 weak private keys were used in 49,060 transactions. However, it needs to be clarified how many of those were used by the bandit.
“There was a guy who had an address who was going around and siphoning money from some of the keys we had access to,” he said at the time.
Source: Chainalysis
Chainalysis made a diagram showing how the money moved, but it didn’t say where it was going. Instead, it called the addresses “intermediary addresses.”
Chainalysis told users that to avoid having weak private keys, they should use well-known and trusted wallets and think about moving funds to hardware wallets if they have a lot of cryptocurrencies.
Also, in 2019, a computer researcher found a wallet flaw that let multiple users get the same key pairs.
