Vigilante hacker burns hundreds of BTC held in wallets used by Russian intelligence
Apr. 27, 2023
By Assad Jafri
The anonymous vigilante reportedly found 986 unique Bitcoin addresses between March 2022 and April 2022 that they claimed were used by Russian security agencies.
A vigilante hacker burned roughly $300,000 worth of Bitcoin found in almost a thousand addresses allegedly linked to Russian intelligence agencies through the OP_RETURN function in 2022, according to Chainalysis research.
The anonymous vigilante reportedly found 986 unique Bitcoin addresses between March 2022 and April 2022 that they claimed were used by Russian security agencies.
They leaked the addresses using the text storage capabilities of the OP_RETURN function which is used to mark BTC transactions as invalid and burnt the majority of BTC contained within the addresses.
The vigilante also sent some of the BTC to an address used to collect donations for Ukraine with the message:
“Help Ukraine with money from the GRU Khakir.”
They used three other messages to mark the addresses:
“GRU to SVR. Used for hacking!”
“GRU to GRU. Used for hacking!”
“GRU to FSB. Used for hacking!”
GRU is the Russian Foreign Military Intelligence Agency; the SVR is the Foreign Intelligence Service; and the FSB is the Federal Security Service — all three are intelligence agencies.
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