On the 6th of November, a suspicious application was advertised in the Energi Discord community channel. The Energi Bureau of Investigations (EBI) team started the investigation immediately. One hacker — working under two aliases, BeeBird and TwoMinutesToHell — was identified to have malicious intent:

A screenshot of messages from the hacker within the Energi Discord Server

Further analysis revealed that the hacker had recently forked Energi’s energiminer Github repository (using multiple Github accounts) and was masquerading the malicious fork as an application that was supposed to help users with the configuration of NRG miners. However, this malicious fork was in fact designed to secretly scan an affected user’s computer for cryptocurrency private keys. Later versions included identity theft capabilities.

The EBI team has successfully identified the hacker and has secured, collected and categorized enough evidence to announce his discovery.

He has been banned from Discord, and (through collaboration with HiveOS management) he has also been permanently banned, as some of his work was aiming for that user group.

All collected pieces of evidence against this individual will be provided to his local law enforcement, so that local law enforcement can use this evidence to proceed with filing multiple criminal charges, such as: computer fraud, conspiracy to commit identity fraud, and identity fraud.

One of the many benefits our treasury system is the ability to provide our community with security and peace of mind. During this attack, we were able to use our treasury to provide the necessary resources for bringing criminals to justice. We have added a new defense system into our Discord community channel. Our Discord defense system automatically detects and reports malicious attempts. This is the first of its kind and will ensure that our community stays safe and secure. Energi continues to grow, and with it, the capabilities of our treasury and our defense system will grow as well. These are unique and valuable contributions to the cryptocurrency space.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure