$3.5B LUBIAN BITCOIN THEFT WENT UNDETECTED FOR 5 YEARS

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

Arkham Intelligence claims to have uncovered evidence of the theft of 127,426 BTC from Chinese mining pool LuBian in December 2020, which would represent the largest cryptocurrency heist in history at $3.5 billion at the time of theft, now valued at $14.5 billion. The breach went undetected for nearly five years, with neither LuBian nor the suspected hacker ever publicly acknowledging the incident, though Arkham discovered over 1,500 onchain messages from LuBian pleading for the funds' return. The theft likely resulted from weak private key generation that enabled a brute-force attack, with the stolen Bitcoin remaining largely dormant except for a wallet consolidation in July 2024. LuBian controlled nearly 6% of Bitcoin's hash rate in 2020. The scale of this theft exceeds other notorious hacks like Mt. Gox and Bitfinex by nominal value at the time of loss.