Luke Dashjr, a Bitcoin core developer for 8 years has notified that bad actors have illegally gained access to his PGP [Pretty Good Privacy] key.
Pretty Good Privacy [PGP] is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication.
It is used to strengthen the security of e-mail conversations and for signing, encrypting, and decrypting messages, emails, files, directories, and entire disc partitions.
My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen. I have no idea how. Help please. Bitcoin. Nevermind many. It’s basically all gone.
Dashjr released a wallet address where some of the stolen BTC had been moved, while it is still unclear how much was taken exactly.
The wallet address in question currently showed four transactions between 2:08 and 2:16 PM UTC on December 31 totaling 216.93 BTC, or $3.6 million at the time of writing.
Dashjr responded that he had “no idea” when pressed for more information about the situation while still appearing shocked and incredulous.
Members of the community began speculating, that this might be connected to a server attack.
“They probably were also monitoring his Twitter and when he posted about getting a new server, they made their move and cleaned him out”, claimed one.
Was Bitcoin Core Developer’s Hack Related To Server Attack?
As more users started brainstorming, some went back and read his earlier tweets from November 17, where he stated that his server had been accessed by unidentified parties.
During that time, evidence suggested that the attacker had deployed a few remote shell backdoors, which were eventually removed upon discovery.
As of now, little is known as more technical details are awaited.
But few of them wondered why a prolific developer of his stature did not move his coin to cold storage addresses when a similar security breach took place a month back or that invest in a more secure setup.
The latest incident has even caught the eye of Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao aka “CZ” who expressed support and sympathies,
“Sorry to see you lose so much. Informed our security team to monitor. If it comes our way, we will freeze it. If there is anything else we can help with, please let us know. We deal with these often, and have Law Enforcement [LE] relationships worldwide,” he wrote.