As we’ve seen over the years, blockchains aren’t quite as secure as some pretend they are.

Rather, although the technology is one of the most secure ways of storing data available to the public, poor coding, social engineering, and the like can still allow bad actors to take advantage of unwary victims.

In the case of the “Blockchain Bandit,” however, the tech worked as intended. The unknown attacker managed to steal crypto assets from up to 732 wallets by a process known as ethercombing – essentially educated guesswork.

A private key to an Ethereum wallet is a 78-digit string of random numbers. Theoretically, this should be impossible to guess without quantum computing or other resources that, as far as we know, do not exist yet.