A bitcoin wallet containing 1 BTC that was being used in a community giveaway was hacked by brute force.
According to Altana Digital Currency Fund chief investment officer (CIO) Alistair Milne, the 1 BTC he was holding in a wallet as part of an ongoing community giveaway was hacked on June 17.
Milne had been running a puzzle-solving giveaway to obtain the 1 BTC since May, releasing a new clue for the 12-word mnemonic seed in regular intervals for community members to guess.
The private keys to the 1BTC wallet at: 3HX5tttedDehKWTTGpxaPAbo157fnjn89s were generated from a 12-word mnemonic seed
Over the next ~30 days I will be releasing the words (or a clue to a word) on my various social media pages
— Alistair Milne (@alistairmilne) May 28, 2020
Milne intended to release the final three clues all at once, in order to prevent the use of a brute-force program to solve the seed phrase.
However, Milne claims he woke Wednesday morning to find the bitcoin wallet empty. According to Milne, the wallet had been brute-forced, with the “hacker” likely renting additional computing power to complete the task.
Woke up to some ‘bad’ news this morning. The 1BTC wallet has been brute forced, which is pretty impressive. They must have rented several GPUs to do it so quickly!
I knew I was against the clock but most people thought it would take a few weeks to brute force 4 seed words pic.twitter.com/uAoLyQkhRJ
— Alistair Milne (@alistairmilne) June 17, 2020
While Milne had intended for the seed phrase to eventually be solved and the 1 BTC transferred, he was impressed by how quickly an attacker was able to force the final seed words.
Milne claims it took the hacker just 44 hours to crack the wallet and that the user paid 0.01 BTC ($93) in mining fees to transfer the bitcoin before others could employ the same brute force attack.
Took the ‘hacker’ just 44 hours to brute force. They paid a huge miner fee (0.01BTC!) so were worried about others doing the same and felt under pressure
— Alistair Milne (@alistairmilne) June 17, 2020
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