Hackers from across the globe have stepped up their efforts to break into a bitcoin (BTC) wallet that is thought to hold more than USD 700 million worth of crypto.
The wallet could be the seventh most valuable in the world and holds BTC 69,370 (USD 714m), per BitInfoCharts data. But its owner may be alarmed to learn that hackers have started to pass around the wallet’s address on forums, as competition hots up for the valuable bounty therein.
Alon Gal, Chief Technology Officer at cyber intelligence company Hudson Rock, told Vice magazine’s Motherboard that he had noticed the wallet, whose address is 1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx, had become a hot topic of conversation on popular hacking site RaidForums.
Gal said,
“The wallet file contains pairs of public keys and encrypted private key of the addresses it controls. So one could modify the file in a binary editor and change the public key of one of the address pairs to that of a high-value BTC address.”
In November last year, crypto research and analysis provider Coin Metrics released a study, which alleged that – as of block 600,000 on the Bitcoin blockchain – around BTC 1.5 million was presumed lost.
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