The infamous hacking group under the guise of “Blockchain Bandit” made a major comeback with the sensation of merging 51,000 Ether into a single wallet, worth a total of $172.2 million, almost two years after being inactive.
The funds transfer took place on December 30 between 8:54 p.m. and 9:18 p.m. UTC from 10 inactive wallet addresses to a multi-signature wallet labeled “0xC45…1D542.” Each transaction accounted for 5,000 ETH. Among them were the ones that took place on January 21, 2023, all of which saw the blockchain bandit transfer 470 Bitcoin (BTC) along with Ethereum (ETH).
The “Blockchain Bandit” is the one who has implemented one of the new forms of cybercrime by using the weak private key method known as “Ethercombing”, which relies on the brute force approach to solve problems in not well-written Code to find random generators. According to crypto security expert Adrian Bednarek, the hacker was able to crack 732 private keys, equivalent to 49,060 transactions.
The bandit started in 2016, but most of the theft cases occurred in 2018. After eight months, he had already generated 45,000 ETH through programmatic theft; This activity made him the biggest threat in the crypto world. This incident became a real thorn in the side given the increasing number of crypto thefts that have taken place over the past year.
