Cyber thieves move $760 million stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex heist

Over $760 million worth of Bitcoin that were stolen from cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016 were moved to new accounts.

More than $760 million worth of Bitcoin, stolen from Asian cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016, were moved on Wednesday to new accounts.

On August 2016, the Asian Bitfinex suffered a security breach that resulted in the theft of 120,000 Bitcoin, the incident had serious repercussions on the Bitcoin value that significantly dropped after the security breach (-20% decrease).

The investigation launched by the Bitfinex exchange along with law enforcement allowed to determine that 119,756 Bitcoin (roughly $72 million in value before the hack) have been stolen from customers’ wallets.

The funds were transferred through tens of transactions ranging from 1 to as much as 1,200 bitcoin (BTC) at a time.

Experts from The Record, published a summary of recent transactions related to the movements from wallets used by the attackers in the 2016 cyberheist. The sum transferred by the crooks ranges from 10057.5798 BTC (per Whale Alert) to 12230.08861 BTC (per BTCParsers).

At the time of the hack, other exchanges blocked any transactions involving the attackers’ addresses to prevent the crooks from cashing out the stolen Bitcoin.

The current value of the overall stolen Bitcoin is around $7.45 billion, and hackers moved $760 million (around 10%). Many cryptocurrency experts believe that the threat actors behind the hack will not be able to cash out them. Anyway, some analysts speculate that threat actors could move large amounts of funds in the attempt of influencing the Bitcoin-USD exchange rate as explained by Adam Cochran.

“The hackers’ plan appears to have been successful. The Bitcoin-USD exchange rate fell from $64k to around $62k last night after hackers moved $760 million.” reported The Record.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, bitcoin)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.