A notorious hacker known as the “Blockchain Bandit” has resurfaced, moving 51,000 Ether, valued at approximately $172 million, into a single wallet after nearly two years of inactivity. This significant movement was reported by blockchain investigator ZachXBT, who revealed in a Telegram post that the Ether was transferred from ten separate wallet addresses to a multi-signature address labeled “0xC45…1D542.” The transfers occurred in batches of 5,000 Ether each, between 8:54 pm and 9:18 pm UTC on December 30.
The Blockchain Bandit initially accumulated these funds between 2016 and 2018 by exploiting weak private keys. Despite the improbability of such a task, the hacker managed to guess 732 private keys, resulting in 49,060 transactions, according to Cointelegraph’s 2019 report referencing Independent Security Evaluators. This technique, termed “Ethercombing,” involved a brute force search for faulty code and number generators. The hacker has engaged in this type of theft since 2016, with the most significant activity noted in 2018.
This revelation is a part of a broader trend of increased cryptocurrency theft. A report by the on-chain security firm Cyvers highlighted that crypto hackers stole over $2.3 billion across 165 major incidents in 2024, marking a 40% increase from the previous year. Such thefts were largely attributed to access control breaches, particularly affecting centralized exchanges and custodian platforms, which constituted 81% or $1.9 billion of the stolen assets.
