The theft of 127,426 BTC from the LuBian mining site in China has been revealed.

The blockchain analysis platform Arkham Intelligence recently revealed a large-scale theft that had been concealed, with a total of 127,426 BTC ( worth approximately 14.5 billion USD at current prices) stolen from the Bitcoin mining operation LuBian in China in December 2020.

At that time, the total value of BTC stolen amounted to 3.5 billion USD, making it the largest cryptocurrency theft in history based on value at the time it occurred. Although the Mt. Gox exchange lost about 744,000 BTC during its operation, the value of this amount of coin when the exchange collapsed was only around several hundred million USD, not reaching the billion level as in the LuBian case.

The prominent mining pool then disappeared

LuBian suddenly appeared at the end of April 2020, rapidly developing and at one point becoming the sixth largest mining pool on the Bitcoin network. The website of the pool claims to be the "safest and most profitable mining pool in the world" in Chinese.

However, by February 2021, LuBian also disappeared suddenly, leading cryptocurrency investors to speculate that this mining operation may have been shut down by the Chinese government, or transitioned to operate as a private mine.

However, according to Arkham's analysis, LuBian has actually had nearly all of its reserve assets stolen. Arkham stated:

"They seem to have been hacked for the first time on December 28, 2020, losing more than 90% of their BTC."

Just one day later, on December 29, an address belonging to LuBian on the Omni layer of Bitcoin was further withdrawn by 6 million USD in the form of BTC and USDT.

Arkham believes that the cause may stem from a vulnerability in the private key generation algorithm used by LuBian:

"It seems that LuBian uses a private key generation algorithm vulnerable to brute-force attacks (exhaustive attacks)."

Currently, LuBian still holds 11,886 BTC ( worth approximately 1.35 billion USD ), which has not been stolen.

The hacker has not sold the BTC, LuBian once sent a message for help

One notable point is that since July 2024, the hacker has not transferred any BTC out of the wallet. In an effort to communicate, LuBian sent a direct message to the attack addresses via the OP_RETURN field of Bitcoin with the content:

"To the whitehat protecting our assets, you can contact us... to discuss the return of assets and the rewards for you."

The message also provides an email address for contact, but it is still unclear whether the hacker has responded or not.

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