Key Takeaways:
- The “Blockchain Bandit” is back, and chainanalysis data shows $90 million in stolen cryptocurrency changing.
- Since 2016, the secretive Blockchain Bandit has been robbing Ethereum wallets, and now has resumed its wicked ways.
After a six-year dormancy, a hacker known as the “Blockchain Bandit” has finally awoken and is moving their illicit earnings.
Chainalysis reports that over the past week, about $90 million in cryptocurrency that has been stolen as a result of the attacker’s extensive history of “programmatic theft” since 2016 has begun to move.
This comprised 470 Bitcoin and 51,000 Ether, approximately worth $90 million in total, leaving the bandit’s address in exchange for a new one.
Understanding that there is a 1 in 115 quadrillion chance of predicting an Ethereum private key produced at random will assist explain how blockchain banditry operates. (Or 1/2256 as a fraction.)
The number of atoms in the cosmos serves as the denominator, or something similar. To choose a random Ethereum key is comparable to picking a beach grain of sand and then asking a friend to find that same grain among “billions of gazillions” of other beaches.
Coming back to the Bandit’s awakening, the total of the assets lost stands to be $90M that were transferred to other wallet addresses from the address linked to the Blockchain Bandit’s robberies. It is probably an effort to make money off of their most recent catch without being discovered or identified by the law.
This seems to be another bummer for the crypto community, which already faces unexpected surprises daily as a result of the recent FTX crash. There is no doubt that a fresh story emerges every day in the cryptosphere, but lately there have been more horror stories and fewer positive developments.
(Source : @chainalysis)
The Blockchain Bandit has been using “Ethercombing” since 2016 to empty Ethereum wallets secured with flimsy private keys. Over 10,000 different victims have reportedly had their wallets emptied as a result of this automated fraud.
The Blockchain Bandit appears to have developed an automated system to scan a list of potentially in use weak private keys, such as single-digit private keys, to check if any addresses were utilising such keys, and if so, to drain those addresses of their cash.
A security expert claimed that while doing research on private key generation, he accidentally came across the hacker. The hacker had set up a node to automatically steal money from addresses with weak keys, he observed at the time.
Chainalysis asserts that it will keep an eye on the situation and publish any new information. At the same time, it urges users to adhere to the recommended procedures for handling private keys.
