Austin Griffith Demonstrates How Fast Bots Can Drain Weak Ethereum Keys

Austin Griffith of the Ethereum Foundation put about $1 in an Ethereum wallet whose private key was the number 6969, and bots went after it almost at once. “As soon as the dollar landed, there were three transactions in the mempool pending trying to steal it,” Griffith said on Oct. 21 on Uneasy Money, the Unchained show he co-hosts.

A private key is the secret number that controls a wallet, so anyone who guesses it can move the funds. Griffith ran the test after a security failure at eMudhra, an Indian certificate authority. A disclosure site for the incident, set up by Mozilla’s Dennis Jackson, said the keys behind eight eMudhra intermediate certificates, created in April 2025, had been compromised, and researcher Scott Helme wrote that each was a number below 256, one of them 4. Firefox and Chrome blocked the certificates on Oct. 17, the day the problem was reported, and Microsoft followed on Oct. 20. On Oct. 22, after the episode was taped, eMudhra said it would leave the global SSL/TLS certificate business.

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On-chain records reviewed by Unchained show that 0.0004 ETH, about $1, reached the address for key 6969 at 20:35 UTC on Oct. 21 in a deposit. A transaction signed with that same key moved it out in the next block, 12 seconds later, and spent most of the deposit on network fees. Transactions from three other addresses hit the wallet just after, and two of them failed. The deposit came from a wallet named slop.atg.eth, which was funded by austingriffith.eth.

Griffith also said “there’s not a number less than 256 that doesn’t already have a nonce,” the counter of transactions an address has sent. Unchained checked the addresses for all 255 such keys, 1 through 255, on Ethereum mainnet, and every one has sent transactions.

Before the result came in, Griffith guessed that bots would stop finding keys somewhere “between eight and 12” digits. Later in the episode, he said 10-digit keys were drained “right away,” while 12-digit keys had “not yet” been drained. He said he had also seeded a 14-digit key and a 16-digit key, “looking for someone to steal my dollar.”

Griffith did not name those keys, and Unchained could not independently check which ones he used. On-chain records show slop.atg.eth funded four more addresses about 14 minutes after the first deposit. One was emptied within 12 seconds, and three still held their funds as of Oct. 23, but the records do not show which key length each belongs to.

The hosts said they would check next week whether the 14- and 16-digit keys had been drained.

Related Listen: Uneasy Money: Is the Internet Breaking Because Bots Never Get Lazy?

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