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.
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.
