The robbery was committed five years ago, but was solved only this week. Bybit and Mt. Gox, much less money was stolen than from the LuBian pool.
Researchers from Arkham Intelligence told on X about the theft of 127,426 bitcoins from the Chinese mining pool LuBian in 2020. Their value at the time was $3.5 billion — today it would be $14.5 billion. The original source of the investigation contains many additional details and graphics.
At its peak, LuBian was the sixth largest Bitcoin mining pool before disappearing in 2021. The pool was so large that it controlled 6% of the total Bitcoin hashrate by May 2020. Ironically, LuBian was touted as the «most secure, highly profitable mining pool in the world».
Arkham believes that the first hack of the pool occurred on December 28, 2020. More than 90% of its bitcoin inventory was stolen then. The next day, another heist was carried out, for $6 million in bitcoin and USDT. On December 31, LuBian moved a small amount of the remaining coins to recovery wallets.
The attack was carried out by brute-forcing LuBian’s private key generation. The key generation used an extremely weak 32-bit entropy, which allowed anyone with the computing power of a gaming computer and a few days to spare to crack LuBian wallets.
LuBian still has its last 11,886 bitcoins intact after the attack. The hackers did the same thing — they are keeping the stolen money intact. Arkham reports that the last known move by the hackers was to consolidate the wallets in July 2024. The attackers got enough coins to become the 13th largest bitcoin holder in the world.
The LuBian hack can be considered the largest cryptocurrency heist in history. It surpasses the recent robbery of the Bybit exchange for $1.5 billion, as well as Hacking of the Mt. Gox in the early 2010s. Technically, the second hack of Mt. Gox in 2014 was the largest in bitcoins and amounted to 850,000 coins. But then the value of bitcoin was much lower than in 2020, and they were worth “only” $460 million.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
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