China’s Nationwide Laptop Virus Emergency Response Middle simply accused america of finishing up the 2020 LuBian Bitcoin exploit.
Nonetheless, Western analysis ties the occasion to a pockets random-number flaw and doesn’t title a state actor.
Open-source forensics on the LuBian drain
The core information of the episode at the moment are effectively documented throughout open sources. In response to Arkham, roughly 127,000 BTC have been moved out of wallets related to the LuBian mining pool over a interval of about two hours on December 28–29, 2020, by means of coordinated withdrawals throughout lots of of addresses.
In response to the MilkSad analysis group and CVE-2023-39910, these wallets have been created with software program that seeded MT19937 with solely 32 bits of entropy, which lowered the search house to roughly 4.29 billion seeds and uncovered batches of P2SH-P2WPKH addresses to brute-force assaults.
MilkSad’s Replace #14 hyperlinks a cluster holding roughly 136,951 BTC that was drained starting on 2020-12-28 to LuBian.com by means of on-chain mining exercise and paperwork the mounted 75,000 sat charge sample on the sweep transactions. Blockscope’s reconstruction exhibits the majority of the funds then sat with minimal motion for years.
Those self same cash now sit in wallets managed by the U.S. authorities. In response to the U.S. Division of Justice, prosecutors are pursuing the forfeiture of roughly 127,271 BTC as proceeds and instrumentalities of alleged fraud and cash laundering tied to Chen Zhi and the Prince Group. The DOJ states that the property are presently in U.S. custody.
Elliptic exhibits that addresses within the DOJ criticism map onto the LuBian weak-key cluster that MilkSad and Arkham had already recognized, and Arkham now tags the consolidated vacation spot wallets as U.S. government-controlled. On-chain sleuths, together with ZachXBT, have publicly famous the overlap between the seized addresses and the sooner weak-key set.
What the forensic document exhibits concerning the LuBian exploit
Concerning attribution, technical groups that first recognized the flaw and traced the flows don’t declare data of who executed the 2020 drain. MilkSad repeatedly refers to an actor who found and exploited weak non-public keys, stating they have no idea the id.
Arkham and Blockscope describe the entity because the LuBian hacker, specializing in technique and scale. Elliptic and TRM confine their claims to tracing and to the match between the 2020 outflows and the later DOJ seizure. None of those sources names a state actor for the 2020 operation.
CVERC, amplified by the CCP-owned World Occasions and native pickups, advances a special narrative.
It argues that the four-year dormancy interval deviates from widespread prison cash-out patterns and subsequently factors to a state-level hacking group.
It then hyperlinks the later U.S. custody of the cash to the allegation that U.S. actors executed the exploit in 2020 earlier than changing it right into a regulation enforcement seizure.
The report’s technical sections observe carefully with unbiased open analysis on weak keys, MT19937, handle batching, and charge patterns.
Its attribution leap rests on circumstantial inferences about dormancy and supreme custody fairly than new forensics, tooling ties, infrastructure overlaps, or different commonplace indicators utilized in state actor attribution.
What we truly know concerning the LuBian Bitcoin drain
There are at the least three coherent readings that match what’s public.
- One is that an unknown celebration, prison or in any other case, discovered the weak-key sample, drained the cluster in 2020, left the cash largely dormant, and U.S. authorities later obtained the keys by means of seizures of units, cooperating witnesses, or associated investigative means, which culminated in consolidation and forfeiture filings in 2024–2025.
- A second treats LuBian and associated entities as a part of an inside treasury and laundering community for Prince Group, the place an obvious hack may have been an opaque inside motion between weak-key-controlled wallets, in keeping with DOJ’s framing of the wallets as unhosted and inside the defendant’s possession, although public paperwork don’t absolutely element how Chen’s community got here to regulate the precise keys.
- The third, superior by CVERC, is {that a} U.S. state actor was chargeable for the 2020 operation. The primary two align with the evidentiary posture introduced within the filings of MilkSad, Arkham, Elliptic, TRM, and the DOJ.
The third is an allegation not substantiated by unbiased technical proof within the public area.
A short timeline of the uncontested occasions is beneath.
From a functionality standpoint, brute forcing a 2^32 seed house is effectively inside attain for motivated actors. At about 1 million guesses per second, a single setup can traverse the house in just a few hours, and distributed or GPU-accelerated rigs compress that additional.
Feasibility is central to the MilkSad-class weak point, explaining how a single actor can sweep 1000’s of susceptible addresses concurrently. The fixed-fee sample and handle derivation particulars revealed by MilkSad and mirrored in CVERC’s technical write-up reinforce this technique of exploitation.
The remaining disputes lie in possession and management at every step, not within the mechanics. DOJ frames the wallets as repositories for prison proceeds tied to Chen and states the property are forfeitable below U.S. regulation.
Chinese language authorities body LuBian as a sufferer of theft and accuse a U.S. state actor of the unique exploit.
Impartial blockchain forensics teams join the 2020 outflows to the 2024–2025 consolidation and seizure, and cease wanting naming who pressed the button in 2020. That’s the standing of the document.
