LuBian Hack

TOTAL LOST $3.5B
Critical #4 All-Time Private Key Compromised (Brute Force) bitcoin

Summarize with AI

Affected Chain bitcoin Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #4 By amount stolen
Year 2020 Incident year

Incident Overview

Brian (BRIAN) is a cryptocurrency launched in 2024and operates on the Base platform. Brian has a current supply of 972,000,000 with 0 in circulation. The last known price of Brian is 0.00037717 USD and is up 4.74 over the last 24 hours.

It is currently trading on 12 active market(s) with $0.00 traded over the last 24 hours. More information can be found at https://brianarmbase.com.

Incident Report

Protocol / Project LuBian
Date of Incident
Affected Chain(s) bitcoin
Attack Technique Private Key Compromised (Brute Force)
Classification Infrastructure
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Official Website brianarmbase.com
Protocol Twitter/X @OnBaseBrian

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
Memes Base Ecosystem

What the Attacker Needed to Succeed

Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.

Technical Knowledge Operational-security tradecraft (phishing, malware, leaked seed phrases, or insider access) to obtain treasury signing authority
Capital Required Minimal capital - only enough to cover gas while draining the compromised accounts
On-Chain Access Valid signing authority over the compromised wallets / multisig signers, allowing direct transfer of funds or stake authorization
Target Reconnaissance Identification of LuBian's high-value treasury accounts and the authority / multisig structure controlling them
Execution Speed Speed to drain the compromised accounts before the team detects the breach and revokes signing authority or freezes the assets
Obfuscation Plan A strategy to launder and move stolen funds - typically through mixers, cross-chain bridges, or decentralized DEX swaps to resist tracing

What Auditors Should Check

Could this have been caught in audit? Hard to catch — private key / OpSec failures are outside smart contract audit scope

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to LuBian, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (December 2020).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Private Key Compromised (Brute Force) are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Access Control Attacks attack class for patterns
  • Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs

Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.

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Related Attack Classes

The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:

See all Access Control Attacks examples →

Sources & References

Learn to Prevent the Next LuBian

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