Picture, if you will, the LuBian mining pool—one of China’s proudest crypto juggernauts—gliding through cyberspace back in 2020, with the self-assurance of an aristocrat at Ascot (albeit slightly less dapper). Suddenly, out of nowhere—bam!—127,426 Bitcoin vanished, quicker than a butler who smells trouble brewing in the pantry (that’s roughly $3.5 billion, for those keeping score, or enough to buy several modest châteaus, depending on location and cheese cellar requirements). This, announced the boffins at Arkham Intelligence, took the trophy as the greatest crypto heist of all time. Cue the ominous but strangely jaunty music. 🎩
The saga unfolds thus: LuBian, at number six on the big-league miners’ leaderboard, enjoyed all the prestige one could want—until December 28, 2020, when an enterprising ne’er-do-well nipped in and filched 90% of their BTC. In a desperate bid to stop further calamity, LuBian scooped up what was left—some 11,886 BTC—and stuffed it into “recovery wallets.” Picture a frantic squirrel hoarding the last few acorns as the winter wind howls. 💸
True to form, nary a soul breathed a word of this disastrous ballyhoo, save for a select few insiders. The rest of the world was left blissfully unaware, sipping tea and discussing the weather, while a king’s ransom in Bitcoin slipped out the back door.
Apparently, LuBian, keen to send a subtle digital “Dear John,” etched an OP_RETURN message onto each wallet address owned by the scoundrel, a love note repeated 1,516 times. The price of heartbreak? About 1.4 BTC—one imagines it was money well spent, if only for the catharsis.
“It appears that LuBian was using an algorithm to generate its private keys that was about as sturdy as wet tissue paper. This may have been the chink in the armor that our daring hackers poked and prodded with glee.”
If you’ve checked the markets lately (between sips of sherry), those pilfered Bitcoin would now fetch a staggering $14.5 billion—a sum that could make even the most humourless Swiss banker crack a smile. The incident is a timely reminder: when managing private keys, rely not on algorithms inspired by fortune cookies. 🔐
LuBian hack leaves ByBit and others in the dust—and not the diamond kind
Fast forward to February: ByBit exchange fell victim to a $1.5 billion hack, previously hailed as “the biggest ever” (champagne corks, not for popping, but for licking wounds). That misadventure hinged on a compromised SafeWallet developer machine—imagine someone sneaking into Fort Knox through a janitor’s forgotten window.
This caper involved a developer’s Amazon Web Services tokens, filched while our hero was online—surely making for a less-than-jolly tea break.
All this happened, mind you, without tripping so much as a single virtual mousetrap. The hackers made off with the goods as if on a pleasant Sunday stroll, humming as they went.
But the crypto Hall of Shame doesn’t end there. In April, a venerable person of many years (and, one hopes, excellent taste in hats) was parted from $330 million worth of Bitcoin via a rather cunning social engineering attack. The pilfered loot ran laps through 300 different wallets—Olympics-level laundering, if you ask me.
Of those ill-gotten gains, a mere $7 million was frozen in the aftermath, which is the financial equivalent of stopping a stampede by putting up a polite sign.
Read More
- SOL PREDICTION. SOL cryptocurrency
- ETH PREDICTION. ETH cryptocurrency
- WLD PREDICTION. WLD cryptocurrency
- EUR USD PREDICTION
- STX PREDICTION. STX cryptocurrency
- XRP PREDICTION. XRP cryptocurrency
- BTC PREDICTION. BTC cryptocurrency
- USD INR PREDICTION
- USD PLN PREDICTION
- EUR VND PREDICTION
2025-08-03 01:29