China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Heart lawful accused the USA of conducting the 2020 LuBian Bitcoin exploit.
Nonetheless, Western compare ties the event to a wallet random-amount flaw and does no longer title a insist actor.
Cybercrime Birth-provide forensics on the LuBian drain
The core info of the episode are of path smartly documented across open sources. Per Arkham, roughly 127,000 BTC were moved out of wallets linked to the LuBian mining pool over a duration of about two hours on December 28–29, 2020, thru coordinated withdrawals across a total bunch of addresses.
Per the MilkSad compare group and CVE-2023-39910, those wallets were created with machine that seeded MT19937 with handiest 32 bits of entropy, which lowered the search home to roughly 4.29 billion seeds and uncovered batches of P2SH-P2WPKH addresses to brute-drive attacks.
MilkSad’s Replace #14 hyperlinks a cluster holding roughly 136,951 BTC that used to be drained origin on 2020-12-28 to LuBian.com thru on-chain mining exercise and paperwork the mounted 75,000 sat price pattern on the sweep transactions. Blockscope’s reconstruction shows the massive majority of the funds then sat with minimal motion for years.
Those same money now take a seat in wallets managed by the U.S. authorities. Per the U.S. Department of Justice, prosecutors are pursuing the forfeiture of roughly 127,271 BTC as proceeds and instrumentalities of alleged fraud and money laundering tied to Chen Zhi and the Prince Community. The DOJ states that the assets are in the intervening time in U.S. custody.
Elliptic shows that addresses in the DOJ complaint plot onto the LuBian susceptible-key cluster that MilkSad and Arkham had already identified, and Arkham now tags the consolidated destination wallets as U.S. authorities-managed. On-chain sleuths, including ZachXBT, agree with publicly renowned the overlap between the seized addresses and the earlier susceptible-key insist.
Cybercrime What the forensic epic shows regarding the LuBian exploit
Concerning attribution, technical teams that first identified the flaw and traced the flows pause no longer utter recordsdata of who accomplished the 2020 drain. MilkSad consistently refers to an actor who chanced on and exploited susceptible non-public keys, declaring they pause no longer know the identity.
Arkham and Blockscope list the entity because the LuBian hacker, specializing in formulation and scale. Elliptic and TRM confine their claims to tracing and to the match between the 2020 outflows and the later DOJ seizure. None of these sources names a insist actor for the 2020 operation.
CVERC, amplified by the CCP-owned World Times and native pickups, advances a determined yarn.
It argues that the four-year dormancy duration deviates from total felony money-out patterns and attributable to this truth aspects to a insist-level hacking group.
It then hyperlinks the later U.S. custody of the money to the allegation that U.S. actors accomplished the exploit in 2020 before changing it into a legislation enforcement seizure.
The document’s technical sections monitor carefully with fair open compare on susceptible keys, MT19937, contend with batching, and price patterns.
Its attribution leap rests on circumstantial inferences about dormancy and final custody as a replace of contemporary forensics, tooling ties, infrastructure overlaps, or utterly different usual indicators utilized in insist actor attribution.
Cybercrime What we of path know regarding the LuBian Bitcoin drain
There are no longer much less than three coherent readings that fit what’s public.
- One is that an unknown occasion, felony or otherwise, chanced on the susceptible-key pattern, drained the cluster in 2020, left the money mostly dormant, and U.S. authorities later obtained the keys thru seizures of devices, cooperating witnesses, or linked investigative formulation, which culminated in consolidation and forfeiture filings in 2024–2025.
- A 2d treats LuBian and linked entities as segment of an inner treasury and laundering network for Prince Community, the assign an apparent hack could had been an opaque inner motion between susceptible-key-managed wallets, constant with DOJ’s framing of the wallets as unhosted and at some level of the defendant’s possession, even though public paperwork pause no longer fully detail how Chen’s network came to wait on an eye on the explicit keys.
- The third, evolved by CVERC, is that a U.S. insist actor used to be in cost for the 2020 operation. Per chance the dear two align with the evidentiary posture introduced in the filings of MilkSad, Arkham, Elliptic, TRM, and the DOJ.
The third is an allegation no longer substantiated by fair technical evidence in the overall public arena.
A transient timeline of the uncontested occasions is below.
From a capability standpoint, brute forcing a 2^32 seed home is smartly inner reach for motivated actors. At about 1 million guesses per 2d, a single setup can traverse the home in a number of hours, and distributed or GPU-accelerated rigs compress that extra.
Feasibility is central to the MilkSad-class weak spot, explaining how a single actor can sweep hundreds of susceptible addresses concurrently. The mounted-price pattern and contend with derivation info revealed by MilkSad and mirrored in CVERC’s technical write-up strengthen this sort of exploitation.
The last disputes lie in possession and wait on an eye on at every step, no longer in the mechanics. DOJ frames the wallets as repositories for felony proceeds tied to Chen and states the assets are forfeitable below U.S. legislation.
Chinese authorities body LuBian as a victim of theft and accuse a U.S. insist actor of the authentic exploit.
Honest blockchain forensics groups join the 2020 outflows to the 2024–2025 consolidation and seizure, and stay in need of naming who pressed the button in 2020. That is the plight of the epic.
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