After a six-year hibernation, a hacker known as the “Blockchain Bandit” has finally awoken and is moving their illicit earnings.
According to the report, over the past week, about $90 million in cryptocurrency has been stolen as a result of the attacker’s extensive history of “programmatic theft” since 2016 has begun to move.
Leaving the bandit’s address for a new one, this comprised 51,000 Ether and 470 Bitcoin worth a combined total of over $90 million.
Given the recent increase in pricing, the robber seems to be shifting their money.
Since the initial attacks six years ago, the attacker’s “programmatic theft” method has stolen more than 10,000 wallets from people all across the world.
According to reports from 2019, the Blockchain Bandit was able to collect about 45,000 ETH by correctly predicting those flimsy private keys.
According to a security specialist, he unintentionally discovered the hacker while conducting a study on the generation of private keys. He observed at the time that the hacker had set up a node to automatically steal money from addresses with weak keys.
The researchers found that 732 weak private keys were associated with 49,060 transactions in total. However, it is unknown how many of those the bandit took advantage of.
At the time, he stated, There was a man who had an address who was going around and stealing money from some of the keys they had access to.
Users are requested to utilize well-known and reputable wallets and to think about shifting money to hardware wallets if there are significant amounts of crypto involved in order to prevent having weak private keys.
A computer researcher also identified a wallet vulnerability in 2019 that allowed several users to receive the same key pairs.
