BlockBeats News, August 3rd, according to Arkham, the once top ten global mining pool LuBian suffered a major security incident in December 2020, with a total of 127,426 BTC stolen. At the current coin price, the stolen BTC is valued at 14.5 billion U.S. dollars, making it the largest Bitcoin theft in history.
Arkham stated that LuBian was a Chinese mining pool that had mining farms in China and Iran. In May 2020, it controlled nearly 6% of the Bitcoin network's total hashing power, exerting significant industry influence. The attack occurred on December 28, 2020, where the attacker allegedly exploited a vulnerability in its private key generation algorithm, successfully stealing over 90% of the holdings through brute force. The following day (December 29th), the hacker transferred some of the BTC again, amounting to 6 million U.S. dollars.
In addition, LuBian attempted to plea with the hacker through on-chain OP_RETURN messages, requesting the return of the stolen assets. The official team sent a total of 1,516 transactions with messages, consuming 1.4 BTC, further confirming that the event was not fraudulent.
Currently, LuBian still holds 11,886 BTC (approximately 1.35 billion U.S. dollars), and the hacker's latest on-chain activity was an address consolidation in July 2024. As of the disclosure date, the hacker still controls the stolen BTC, their identity is unknown, and their holdings now rank as the 13th largest BTC holder globally, even surpassing the Mt. Gox hacker address.