Stolen hot-wallet keys let an attacker empty crypto casino Duelbits on five blockchains

What happened

Between 08:58 and 09:56 UTC on 24 September 2026, someone signing for Duelbits' hot wallets emptied them on Ethereum, BNB Chain, Tron, Solana and Bitcoin. Bridges turned the haul into ether, and by 13:08 UTC 2,234.60 ETH, about $6.02m, sat in one wallet. Duelbits took its site offline at 11:42 UTC to investigate.

Native ETH, BNB, TRX, SOL and BTC all left key-controlled wallets, which only the private keys can sign for, and Solana's ed25519 keys fell in the same hour as the secp256k1 keys of the other four chains. The $6.07m figure values the ether and bitcoin the attacker ended up with at Chainlink's 14:29 UTC prices, $2,691.95 an ether and $84,808.10 a bitcoin; CertiK counted about $6m of suspicious outflows. The emptied Ethereum wallet made its first transaction on 14 February 2024, the morning after Duelbits lost $4.6m from its previous hot wallet. A Kraken hot wallet sent 60 ETH, about $161,500, into the laundering wallets between 10:56 and 12:07 UTC. Duelbits co-founder Joe put the loss at "a ~$7M hack" at 13:38 UTC on 24 September; that operator figure is about $0.93m above the measured $6.07m, which counts the ether and bitcoin the attacker ended up holding.