By
Mayowa Adebajo
October 23rd, 2023
The hacker, who had stolen money from Blockchain.info, has returned all the funds back to the company, claiming the bitcoins were taken to protect the users.
Popular bitcoin website Blockchain.info was attacked by hackers, who have stolen 225 bitcoins from many of the site’s users. According to Blockchain.info, the site was attacked on December 8th during a scheduled update of the bitcoin wallet.
During the process, the developers accidentally affected the security system, what led to the creation of a security hole, which allowed hackers stealing the money. The hole remained open for about two and a half hours, but then was quickly detected.
In general, the hackers attacked a few hundred bitcoin wallets, less than 0.0002% of the total number of users. The wallets created through the Chrome extension, Android and iOS platforms, were not affected.
One of the Reddit users confirmed losing bitcoins after sending money to the new wallet on Blockchain.info. The user wrote: “Within 17 seconds of me depositing 100 BTC into my account they were stolen and transferred to another address without me even being logged into the blockchain wallet service.”
The member of the Bitcoin Talk forum, registered under the ‘johoe’ nickname, wrote that he or she took bitcoins from Blockchain.info users to ensure their safety and protect them from potential hackers attack. ‘Johoe’ added he or she would send cryptocurrency back to the users who prove the ownership of their wallets.
“There were a large bunch of new broken addresses today (several 100s in one day).I took the liberty of saving some funds before they got swiped by others. If you can convince me that they belong to you (signing a message with the address is obviously not enough; the private key is already known), I will send the funds back. Look into the file http://johoe.mooo.com/bitcoin/broken.txt, to see whether your address was broken.”
‘Johoe’ then wrote all the funds were sent back to Blockchain.info: “The money has been returned to blockchain.info. Please write to blockchain support to claim refund.”
The company is now receiving claims from its users and is going to soon reimburse those who lost their money.
“We have sent an alert to all users who have potentially vulnerable addresses in their wallets, for which we have an email on file. We are committed to working with any affected users to assess and rectify any issues,” the company wrote on its website.
However, the company stated that not all the bitcoins taken from Blockchain’s users were stolen by ‘johoe’.
The hacker was supported by the bitcoin community and some even suggested the company to send the money reward to ‘johoe’.
