Luke Dashjr, one of Bitcoin's early developers, has lost approximately 216 BTC in a hack, according to a series of tweets he posted on January 1. Dashjr, known for his contributions to the Bitcoin Core project, claims that the hack occurred due to a compromised private key. The value of the lost funds is around $3.6 million at current market prices.
In the follow-up tweet, Dashjr wrote the money is "basically all gone." He also mentioned that he had noticed the hack only after receiving e-mails from Coinbase and Kraken exchanges about login attempts. At this time, it is unclear how exactly the hack took place and how the attacker gained access to Dashjr's PGP key. One of the users suggested that a backdoor software on Dashjr's computer might have led to the hack.
The incident caught the attention of CZ from Binance. He expressed his sympathy and offered help, mentioning that Binance has "Law Enforcement (LE) relationships worldwide" since they're dealing with such issues on a regular basis.
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a data encryption and decryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication using a combination of public-key and symmetric-key encryption to secure communication. It is often used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partitions.
When a user wants to send a piece of information securely, they use the recipient's public key to encrypt the message. Only the recipient with the corresponding private key can decrypt the message. PGP also uses a message digest algorithm to create a unique fingerprint for each message to ensure its integrity.
Asked by a user how a compromised PGP could have led to the hack, Dashjr replied the following:
