ccnews24.net
The "Blockchain Bandit" has awoken from a six-year slumber and is now moving his illegal gains.
Chainalysis reports that over the past week, approximately $90 million in crypto has been moved from the attacker's long-running series of "programmatic thefts" since 2016.
A total of 51,000 ether was included in this transaction Ether ETH$1,609 and 470 Bitcoins BTC$23,011—An estimated $90 million was stolen, leaving the bandit's old address for a new one. A Chainalysis revealed the following:
“We suspect that the bandit is moving their funds given the recent jump in prices.”
A hacker dubbed the "Blockchain Bandit" had the ability to empty Ethereum wallets protected by weak private keys using a process called "Ethercombing."
Since the first attacks were perpetrated six years ago, the attacker's "programmatic theft" process has stolen more than 10,000 wallets from individuals around the world.
Source: Twitter
By successfully guessing those fragile private keys, the Blockchain Bandit amassed almost 45,000 ETH in 2019.
Blockchain Bandit crypto movements. Source: Chainalysis
The Chainalysis program produced a diagram illustrating the flow of funds, but did not specify the target address, only indicating they were "intermediary addresses."
Chainalysis recommends that users use well-known and trusted wallets if they intend to store large amounts of cryptocurrency and consider moving those funds to hardware wallets if they intend to store a significant amount of cryptocurrency.Another vulnerability discovered in 2019 involved multiple users receiving the same key pairs.