HTX Ex-Employees Sentenced to 3 Years for Stealing 27,000 Mnemonics and 10,000 User Private Keys
In a recent revelation, Chinese police disclosed that four former employees of HTX (formerly Huobi) were involved in implanting Trojans in cryptocurrency wallets, resulting in the theft of over 40,000 user mnemonics and private keys.
The individuals responsible have been sentenced to three years in prison, although the specific amount of stolen cryptocurrencies remains undisclosed.
The case came to light in May 2023 when citizen Ou discovered that his virtual currency, worth millions of RMB, had vanished from his account after checking it at a coffee shop.
Upon investigation, Ou found that his virtual currency had been stolen a month prior.
By analyzing the wallet software, Ou identified a backdoor program that automatically obtained wallet addresses and private keys.
In August 2023, Ou reported the incident to the Xuhui Public Security Bureau, leading to the arrest of suspects Zhang, Dong, and Liu, who were all former Company A employees.
The arrested individuals confessed to adding a backdoor program to the wallet software in early March 2023 to steal users’ private keys. Liu wrote the backdoor program, Dong purchased the server and domain name and encrypted the stolen data, and Zhang set up the server and database.
The backdoor program activated five days after installation, uploading private keys, mnemonics, and other data to a designated database.
After gathering this data, they destroyed the server and database at the end of May 2023, planning to use the stolen keys to access virtual currencies two years later. Despite their plans, they were arrested three months later.
The investigation revealed that the trio had not yet used the stolen data to transfer virtual currencies, including Ou’s. However, they
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