‘’Blockchain Bandit’’ Steals 45,000 ETH By Simply Guessing Weak Passwords

Blockchain bandit or a crypto hacker managed to steal about 45,000 ether altcoins by simply guessing the weak private keys of users. The report from the incident by the Independent Security Evaluators reached our latest cryptocurrency news today.

According to the report published today, the hack attack was discovered by accident. Adrian Bednarek who is a senior security analyst is the one who discovered the attack. He says that guessing private keys is basically a long shot, the blockchain bandit managed to gain access to more than 730 private keys which gave him the ability to make transactions as he was the account holder.

The report also outlines that there was not brute force used to search and find the random private keys, but the blockchain bandit only used a combination of faulty codes and faulty random number generators. Bednarek noticed that some of the associated wallets with the private keys had high volumes of transactions that led to a single address but no money was coming out. Bednarek explained:

 “There was a guy who had an address who was going around and siphoning money from some of the keys we had access to. We found 735 private keys, he happened to take money from 12 of those keys we also had access to. It’s statistically improbable he would guess those keys by chance, so he was probably doing the same thing […] he was basically stealing funds as soon as they came into people’s wallets.”

At the current height of ethreum’s value, it is estimated that the blockchain bandit managed to take out more than $50 million from the wallets. The funds are now valued at about $7.8 million. Bednarek also explains that the private keys may have been vulnerable because there were coding errors associated with them in the software that generated them. Another theory is that the crypto owners who have the private keys and use a passphrase, the generator is generating identical ones by using weak entries such as ‘’abc123’’ or four zeros leaving the passphrase easy to guess.

The identity of the blockchain bandit is still unknown but Bednarek suggests that someone from North Korea could have been behind it. Back in March, the United Nations Security Council report that the best cryptocurrency news sites wrote about, claimed that the country had amassed about $650 million in crypto and fiat through hacking attacks.