According to Blockchain Analytics Platform Arkham Intelligence, Chinese mining pool Lubian was hacked with 127,426 Bitcoin (BTC) in 2020, valued at around $3.5 billion at the time, making it the largest crypto hack in history.
The platform retrospectively revealed the robbery on Saturday, claiming that Rubien, who emerged as the sixth largest BTC mining pool at the time, was first hacked on December 28, 2020.
Approximately 90% of the BTC in the pool was stolen by threat actors before Rubien moved the remaining 11,886 BTC into the recovery wallet. According to the Intelligence Platform, neither the platform nor the hackers made public announcements at the time.
The mining pool embed an op_return message in each of the wallet addresses belonging to the hacker with 1,516 different messages, costing about 1.4 btc. The Arkham team also wrote:
“It appears that Rubian used algorithms to generate private keys that are susceptible to brute force attacks. This could have been a vulnerability exploited by hackers.”
Stolen Bitcoin is currently worth around $14.5 billion at its current price, and the attacks underscore the need for crypto users to practice aggressive security measures and private key management, relying solely on the most robust random number generators to create keys.
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Rubien Hack is on top of Bibit Hack and other infamous Crypto-Broosters
In February, the Bibit exchange was hacked for $1.5 billion, and the attack was reported as the biggest crypto hack in history at the time.
The bibit attack was attributed to the compromised Safewallet Developer Machine, according to posthumous reports of Safewallet and Cybersecurity Firm Mandiant.
These hackers may have misused the developer’s machine by installing malware on their system and using the developer’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) token while the developer is active online.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndv0rfehetq
This allowed hackers to access sensitive systems without setting alarm bells or causing a response from the team.
In April, seniors lost $330 million in Bitcoin through social engineering attacks.
The BTC robbery was considered the fifth-largest code robbery in history at the time, and only $7 million of the $330 million was frozen shortly after the attack.
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