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Beware Chinese sites and HUOBI / HTX

Scope of the Theft

  • Over 40,000 user mnemonics and private keys were stolen

  • More than 27,000 mnemonics and 10,000 private keys were collected

  • Over 19,000 digital wallet addresses were compromised

Shanghai Prosecutors Reveal Details of Former Huobi Employee’s Trojan Horse Incident link

According to a report by The Paper, on August 30, the Xuhui District People’s Procuratorate in Shanghai released a briefing on crimes related to virtual currencies, detailing a case involving former Huobi employees who planted malware to steal users’ private keys.

In March 2023, Liu, Zhang, and Dong conspired to illegally obtain others’ digital wallet private keys and seed phrases by embedding a “backdoor” into an app package. This backdoor collected users’ private keys, seed phrases, and IP addresses, which were then uploaded to a pre-established VPS backend server’s database and later downloaded to a local server.

Liu was responsible for writing the code that requested the upload of users’ private keys, seed phrases, IP addresses, and connecting to the VPS server. Zhang was tasked with setting up the VPS server and database to manage and store the uploaded data, linking the domain name to the VPS server’s IP, and downloading the stolen data. Dong handled the purchase of the domain name from the service provider and implemented the RSA encryption logic.

An investigation revealed that the trio illegally obtained 27,622 seed phrases and 10,203 private keys (after deduplication). These seed phrases and private keys were successfully parsed into 19,487 unique digital wallet addresses.

h/t Sanjay for bringing this to the communities attention.

Comments

Brad Elliott

What a nightmare. CEX's really are a public toilet. Get in, do your business and get out. Not your keys, not your crypto. Feel sorry for anyone that lost because of this.

Rhododendro

Thats stupid how woulf they think they would get away with that

JkaCrpto

agreed, but not just CEXes - backdoor can be implemented in any crypto wallet be it mobile/desktop or extension, or do we truly believe we all carefully check the code everytime new updates are pushed out... and even that can be done only for open sourced wallets... sad state of whole industry atm imho...

Step Ahead

Makes BTC ETFs a preferred choice IMO

Wil

Great, a major compromise would be the final nail in the bull coffin

The Bull

Why I'm thinking of getting a burner crypto phone that just has my phantom wallet with no data package. Really worried about apps having the ability to steal my keys or seed.

MGM

This is neither the right nor intended take of the story, mate! 😁Blackrock has done and is doing way more sinister stuff and if you suffer the illusion thay the law will protect you against them.... well, you have another thing coming. Remember the nationwide data breach with social security numbers? It happened in US. It is happening in US.

MGM

Unplugged phone(the name of the brand itself) in US, to an extent Nothing phone in UK.

Tassiegirl

We are so far away from the original intent of went bitcoin was created

Baw

isn't this last month's news

BuzzyBear

I’ve thought the same thing. The thought of loosing my phone nowadays would cause me serious stress too.

KindHeartFierceMind

And you wonder why some of us prefer ETFs or Exchanges ...self custody is a huge responsibility for Krill, Shrimp, maybe even crabs...but definitely anyone over 55 who's not super tech savvy.