The post Blockchain Bandit moves $172m after 2 years of inactivity appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
The infamous hacker group, under the guise of “Blockchain Bandit,” made a grand comeback with a sensation of merging 51,000 Ether into a single wallet, which totaled $172.2 million, almost two years after going into stealth mode. Funds transfer occurred between 8:54 pm and 9:18 pm UTC on Dec. 30 from 10 inactive wallet addresses into a multi-signature wallet labeled as “0xC45…1D542.” Each transaction accounted for 5,000 ETH. Among them, the ones that had been on Jan. 21, 2023, all were the ones that the blockchain bandit transferred 470 Bitcoin (BTC) along with Ethereum (ETH). Diagram detailing the consolidation of $172.2 million worth of Ether by the Blockchain Bandit, illustrating the flow of funds from hacked wallets to a single multi-signature wallet. Courtesy of TRM Labs. Source: ZachXBT The “Blockchain Bandit” is the one that has implemented one of the new forms of cybercrime by using the weak private keys method, known as “Ethercombing”, which relies on the brute force approach for finding issues in not-well-written code and randomness generators. As for the crypto security expert Adrian Bednarek, the hacker was able to break 732 private keys, corresponding with 49,060 transactions. It all started in 2019 A security analyst, Adrian Bednarek, was researching Ethereum wallets for a corporate client What he found shocked him: Hundreds of private keys that were dangerously weak That’s when he stumbled on the Bandit… pic.twitter.com/6EamxMjoKo — Pix🔎 (@PixOnChain) December 31, 2024 The bandit started in 2016, but most of the theft cases were in 2018. After eight months, he had already generated 45,000 ETH through programmatic theft; this activity made him the biggest threat in the crypto world. This incident became a real thorn in the side of the rise in the number of crypto thefts that have been happening over the last few years.…