Arkham Intelligence Reveals $14 Billion Bitcoin Hack on LuBian Mining Pool

2 min

Arkham Intelligence has revealed the largest crypto hack to date, involving the theft of Bitcoin worth $3.5 billion at the time, now valued at $14 billion. This hack targeted LuBian, a Chinese mining pool.

Key Details

127,426 BTC were stolen from LuBian in December 2020.
LuBian was one of the largest mining pools, controlling almost 6% of the Bitcoin network's hash rate as of May 2020.
The initial hack occurred on December 28, 2020, with over 90% of its BTC taken.
A subsequent theft of $6 million in BTC and USDT happened on December 29.
This hack surpasses the $1.5 billion Bybit hack from February 2023.
Bybit's hack involved the theft of over 400,000 ETH using social engineering tactics.

Recovery Attempts

LuBian attempted to recover the stolen Bitcoin by sending OP_RETURN messages to the hacker, spending 1.4 BTC across 1516 transactions.
The messages indicate that the hacking method was likely through brute-force attacks on weakly generated private keys.
LuBian currently holds 11,886 BTC, worth around $1.35 billion.
The hacker remains in possession of the stolen Bitcoin, consolidating it into another wallet in July 2024, making them the 13th largest BTC holder.

Bitcoin