'Blockchain Bandit' reawakens: $90M in stolen crypto seen shifting

A hacker dubbed the “Blockchain Bandit” has yet woken from a six-year slumber and has started to determination their ill-gotten gains.

According to Chainalysis, astir $90 cardinal successful crypto pilfered from the attacker’s long-running drawstring of “programmatic theft” since 2016 has started moving implicit the past week.

This included 51,000 Ether (ETH) and 470 Bitcoin (BTC), worthy astir $90 cardinal leaving the Bandit’s code for a caller one, with Chainalysis noting:

“We fishy that the bandit is moving their funds fixed the caller leap successful prices."

The hacker was dubbed the “Blockchain Bandit” owed to being capable to bare Ethereum wallets protected with anemic backstage keys successful a process termed “Ethercombing.”

The attacker’s “programmatic theft” process has drained much than 10,000 wallets from individuals crossed the globe since the archetypal attacks were perpetrated six years ago.

1/ $90M stolen funds connected the move: After 6 years of hodling, the “Blockchain Bandit” has awoken. In this we screen however the Blockchain Bandit amassed this treasure trove and wherever the funds are presently held.

— Chainalysis (@chainalysis) January 25, 2023

In 2019, Cointelegraph reported that the "Blockchain Bandit" managed to amass almost 45,000 ETH by successfully guessing those frail backstage keys.

A information expert said helium discovered the hacker by mishap portion researching backstage cardinal generation. He noted astatine the clip that the hacker had acceptable up a node to automatically filch funds from addresses with anemic keys.

The researchers identified 732 anemic backstage keys associated with a full of 49,060 transactions. It is unclear however galore of those were exploited by the bandit, however.

“There was a feline who had an code who was going astir and siphoning wealth from immoderate of the keys we had entree to,” helium said astatine the time.

Blockchain Bandit crypto movements. Source: Chainalysis

Chainalysis produced a diagram depicting the travel of the funds, however, it did not specify the people address, lone labeling them arsenic "intermediary addresses."

To debar having anemic backstage keys, Chainalysis advised users to usage well-known and trusted wallets, and see moving funds to hardware wallets if ample amounts of cryptocurrency are progressive to debar having anemic backstage keys.

Related: Hackers keeping stolen crypto: What is the semipermanent solution?

Also successful 2019, a machine researcher discovered a wallet vulnerability that issued the aforesaid cardinal pairs to aggregate users.