Intelligence brokers have uncovered the largest-ever (or at the very least largest found) Bitcoin heist, amounting to 127,426 stolen Bitcoins. In accordance with Arkham Intelligence on X, the heist was made in opposition to the Chinese language mining pool LuBian in 2020, amounting to a price of $3.5 billion ($14.5 billion today).
LuBian was the 6th-largest mining pool on the Bitcoin community at its peak, earlier than the pool disappeared in 2021. LuBian was so large that it managed 6% of the Bitcoin community’s whole hash-rate capability alone by Might 2020. Mockingly, LuBian was allegedly marketed as “the most secure high-yielding mining pool in the world” earlier than its disappearance.
Arkham believes the primary hack occurred on December twenty eighth, 2020, constituting over 90% of the mining pool’s Bitcoin provide. A day later, one other hack was executed, amounting to over $6 million of extra Bitcoin and USDT. On December thirty first, LuBian moved what little cash it had left into restoration wallets.
The assault (Arkham believes) was carried out utilizing brute-force assaults on LuBian’s non-public key technology capabilities. LuBian’s non-public key technology was allegedly utilizing a particularly weak 32-bit entropy, permitting anybody with the processing energy of a gaming laptop and some days to hack into LuBian’s wallets.
LuBian is nonetheless holding onto its remaining 11,886 Bitcoins for the reason that assault, and the hacker has performed the identical (and nonetheless holding onto the entire crypto it stole from LuBian). Arkham studies that the hacker’s final recognized motion was a pockets consolidation in July 2024. LuBian’s hacker received sufficient coin to make them the Thirteenth-largest Bitcoin holder worldwide.
The LuBian hack is now thought of the biggest crypto hack in historical past, surpassing the Mt. Gox hacks in the early 2010s. Technically, the second Mt. Gox hack in 2014 consisted of considerably extra stolen Bitcoins, amounting to 850,000 cash. However again then, the worth of Bitcoin was far decrease than it was in 2020, making LuBian’s $3.5 billion hack (now worth $14.5 billion) much more worthwhile. (The second Mt. Gox Hack was valued at “simply” $460 million worth of stolen Bitcoin against this.)
