In this paper we examine how, even when faced with this statistical improbability, ISE discovered 732 private keys as well as their corresponding public keys that committed 49,060 transactions to the Ethereum blockchain. Additionally, we identified 13,319 Ethereum that was transferred to either invalid destination addresses, or wallets derived from weak keys that at the height of the Ethereum market had a combined total value of $18,899,969. In the process, we discovered that funds from these weak-key addresses are being pilfered and sent to a destination address belonging to an individual or group that is running active campaigns to compromise/gather private keys and obtain these funds. On January 13, 2018, this “blockchainbandit” held a balance of 37,926 ETH valued at $54,343,407.

In an experiment, we picked a private key of 1, for no reason other than that it is the lower bound of a possible private key for secp256k1 and it also lies within the 1 to 232-1 range of a 32-bit truncated key. We use the private key 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 to derive the public Ethereum address 0x7e5f4552091a69125d5dfcb7b8c2659029395bdf.

source: ML