A hacker successfully stole around 217 Bitcoin or more than $3 million from a Bitcoin core developer.
The self-proclaimed longest contributing Bitcoin core developer, Luke Dashjr, revealed on January 2 that an unknown hacker had stolen “basically all” of his Bitcoin holdings.
The total of Bitcoin that was stolen was not disclosed, however, in a Twitter thread, it was mentioned that 216.93329199 coins, or around $3.6 million at the current exchange rate, were lost.
Bitcoin core developer cyber-attacked
Dashjr attributed the hack of his Bitcoin wallet to a compromised PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) key and later indicated in a Reddit thread that the attacker’s IP address originated from a ColoCrossing server. The last time he accessed his cold wallets was in September, but he was at a loss to explain how they were compromised.
In his tweet, Dashjr also rued the U.S. authorities’ lack of action, saying “They didn’t care”.
In a subsequent tweet, Dashjr criticized ColoCrossing for allegedly “missing the ball on abuse investigation last time” and pledged to switch server providers. Some respondents pointed out that a security breach he tweeted about in November may have been related to the hack.
‘Everything is compromised’
Dashjr continued to respond to questions on Twitter, claiming that he feels “everything is compromised,” including his Twitter account.
In addition, he aggressively discouraged the use of Bitcoin Knots, a Bitcoin wallet signed with his own compromised PGP key.
Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao gave support, stating that he has alerted the exchange’s security staff of the theft and that “we will freeze” any cryptocurrency supplied to Binance in connection with the attack.