In a jaw-dropping revelation, Arkham Intelligence has uncovered a massive Bitcoin theft dating back to December 2020. The now-defunct Chinese mining pool, LuBian, fell victim to a cyber heist where hackers managed to siphon off a staggering 127,426 Bitcoins. At the time, these digital assets were valued at $3.5 billion, but with today’s prices, their worth has ballooned to approximately $14.5 billion.
LuBian was a major player in the Bitcoin mining scene, once ranking sixth globally and controlling about six percent of the network’s total hash rate. However, by 2021, LuBian had mysteriously vanished from the public eye.
The breach took place on December 28, 2020, when more than 90 percent of LuBian’s Bitcoin reserves disappeared in a single mysterious transaction. The next day, attackers drained an additional $6 million in Bitcoin and USDT from a LuBian address on the Bitcoin Omni layer. Alarmed by these events, LuBian quickly transferred their remaining coins into secure recovery wallets by the end of the month.
The investigation by Arkham suggests that the theft was made possible due to a weak key-generation process that relied on just 32 bits of entropy. This vulnerability could be exploited using gaming hardware, given enough time for brute-force attacks.
In a desperate attempt to reclaim the stolen assets, LuBian spent 1.4 Bitcoins on over 1,500 OP_RETURN messages, pleading with the perpetrator to return the coins. The nature of these communications suggests they genuinely came from the legitimate operators, not from opportunistic hackers.
Both LuBian and the hacker have held onto their respective coins ever since. LuBian still controls 11,886 Bitcoins, valued at about $1.35 billion today. Meanwhile, the hacker has only moved their funds to consolidate wallets as recently as July 2024. If ranked by Arkham’s standards, the thief would be the 13th largest known Bitcoin holder, surpassing even the infamous Mt. Gox hacker.
This incident serves as a stark reminder of the security risks associated with cryptocurrency, emphasizing the importance of robust security measures in the digital age.
