According to blockchain intelligence company, Arkham, it has uncovered the biggest Bitcoin (BTC) theft in history. It involved a 127,426 Bitcoin hack from a China-based mining pool, named LuBian.
The hack remained unnoticed for years. Neither LuBian nor the attacker disclosed the breach. Arkham’s investigation and revelation marks the first public acknowledgment. Their data shows over 90% of LuBian’s BTC was drained in a short time.
On-chain data shows the first major breach happened on December 28, 2020. By the next day, another $6 million in Bitcoin had vanished.
The value of Bitcoin stolen was worth $3.5 billion at the time. At the current Bitcoin price, the stolen BTC is worth more than $14.5 billion dollars.
After the Bitcoin hack, LuBian tried to contact the thief using Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature. They sent 1.4 BTC across 1,516 messages, asking the hacker to return the funds and offering a reward.
According to Arkham’s investigation, the root cause that led to the exploit was the generation of weak private keys. LuBian algorithms were probably vulnerable to brute-force attacks.
One of the reports that analyzed the Lubian Bitcoin hack attributed it to a problem with the firm’s Trust Wallet code. This code is based on a 32-bit entropy and was a target of attacks in the past. This method was already applied in previous cases of thousands of hacked wallets.
Despite the breach, LuBian managed to preserve 11,886 BTC, currently worth about $1.35 billion. However, the stolen funds now rank the hacker as the 13th largest BTC holder tracked by Arkham, even ahead of the infamous Mt. Gox hacker.
Before the latest revelation about the Lubian Bitcoin hack, the exploit on Bybit was the largest. The crypto platform lost over $1.4 Billion in ETH to malicious actors.
Arkham’s data visualization shows how the stolen Bitcoin was moved across hundreds of wallets. The scale and secrecy of the breach have stunned the crypto community.
LuBian was one of the biggest mining pools in 2020, operating from China and Iran. At that time, it was in control of almost 6% of the hash rate of the Bitcoin network.
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