LuBian’s massive 2020 Bitcoin heist comes to light: 127K BTC lost forever
Key Takeaways
The 2020 LuBian Bitcoin heist has been revealed as the biggest hack in crypto historical past, with 127,426 BTC stolen, price roughly $14.5 billion on the time of writing.
An extended-unsolved thriller within the crypto world has simply been delivered to mainstream consideration.
Blockchain sleuths at Arkham Intelligence have revealed that LuBian, a Chinese language Bitcoin [BTC] mining pool, was the sufferer of a colossal hack again in December 2020, which noticed 127,426 BTC vanish and not using a hint.
On the time, the stolen cash have been price $3.5 billion, which is an absurdly excessive quantity to start with.
However with Bitcoin’s meteoric rise within the following years, the cash’ worth soared to a staggering $14.5 billion, formally marking it as the biggest crypto heist in historical past.
Arkham Intelligence uncovers the rip-off
Arkham Intelligence uncovered that hackers breached LuBian, which was as soon as the sixth-largest Bitcoin mining pool, on the twenty eighth of December 2020, and stole roughly 127,426 BTC.
But for years, neither LuBian nor the attacker disclosed the incident, retaining it solely below wraps.
The truth is, hackers reportedly drained about 90% of LuBian’s funds earlier than the pool managed to safe the remaining 11,886 BTC in restoration wallets, dealing a large hit to the pool’s treasury.
However, it didn’t cease there. The subsequent day, the breach additional escalated, with one other $6 million in BTC and USDT going out of LuBian’s wallets.
In an try to barter, LuBian spent 1.4 BTC throughout 1,516 transactions to ship messages to hackers, pleading with them to return the stolen funds and providing a reward, however their makes an attempt have been to no avail.
Arkham traced the exploit again to weak personal key era, which doubtless made LuBian’s wallets vulnerable to brute-force assaults.
Crypto weaknesses, uncovered
The LuBian hack has now eclipsed all earlier crypto thefts, even surpassing February’s $1.5 billion ByBit breach, which was earlier dubbed as the biggest in historical past.
Although in contrast to ByBit, whose loss was traced again to a compromised developer machine, LuBian’s vulnerability reportedly stemmed from flawed Belief Pockets code that relied on weak 32-bit entropy, a way already exploited in previous pockets breaches.
Remarkably, the hacker has left the stolen Bitcoin untouched, consolidating it right into a single pockets as just lately as July 2024.
At $14.5 billion in worth, the stash makes the perpetrator the Thirteenth-largest BTC holder, rating above even the notorious Mt. Gox hacker.
The size of the LuBian exploit displays not solely vital gaps in pockets safety, but in addition how such breaches can ship shockwaves throughout the business.
On the identical time, much less technically refined scams are additionally going down throughout the ecosystem, impacting smaller retail gamers as properly.
Subsequently, as scrutiny intensifies throughout each company and particular person actors in crypto, the LuBian incident stands as a stark reminder of the ecosystem’s fragility, each technical and reputational.
