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A portfolio associated with this week's $ 31.00 Tether hack has been linked to thefts of # Bitcoin exchange precedent in the tens of thousands of bitcoins.
As NCC reported, Tether's development team revealed yesterday that its wallet had been hacked for $ 31 million in USDT, an Omni-based token that is pegged to the dollar American at a ratio of one to one.
The Reddit user, SpeedflyChris, began to examine the bitcoin addresses associated with theft, and to use WalletExplorer, a Bitcoin block explorer that aggregates individual clustered addresses to identify potential owners of portfolios. address and portfolios that had been used during the Bitcoin and Huobi Bitcoin exchange hacks 2015.
Apparently, the address that had been used during the Tether hack had received .01 BTC shortly before the hack. The sender of this transaction had recently received coins from this portfolio created in 2015. It's where things start to get interesting.
This same portfolio was first used to steal more than 18,500 BTC – $ 5 million and then more than $ 150 million – from Bitstamp in January 2015. A few months later, this portfolio sent 174 BTC to a portfolio that had also received funds the purse used to empty Huobi's hot wallet following a hack of 8500 BTC in December 2015; these funds are now worth $ 70 million.
SpeedflyChris said NCC that he stumbled upon the link between hacks by accident.
"Actually, I was not looking at all that's the craziest thing." It looks like they've transferred 0.01BTC in the wallet that they were going to move the 30 million from longevity to several hours ago, presumably so that they have BTC in the wallet to pay the moving costs of those stolen links eventually.In the end, the Tether wallet had a little more than 5BTC than They took, so they really did not need to do that at all, "he said.
He said that what surprised him most about the Tether hack was the way the hacker was able to link the wallets used in several hacks, regardless of the powerful tools of the hack. Blockchain analysis that can be used to unmask portfolio owners. Surprisingly, he also linked these portfolios to a series of LocalBitcoins transactions, which means that whoever was using this LocalBitcoins address in 2015 is almost certainly the hacker.
"Strangely, they transferred these coins to the help of a wallet connected to the Bitstamp hack, which even brought me down the rabbit hole and from there all the transactions fell in. Then, if you look at how the Bitstamp and Huobi funds were moved after, they went to the same portfolios, and then were divided with a lot of coins being moved to BTC-e most of the time. lots of 1000. 1000BTC had passed through a wallet that had already been used to deposit on LocalBitcoins so months before, "he continued.
Therefore, he believes that the hacker – who has apparently stolen at least $ 250 million in dollars today – is "not particularly concerned about the analysis of the chain, or just ignoring how powerful it is. "
Image from Shutterstock.