Hackers Figure Out a Trick to Steal Bitcoin From Cold Wallets, Grab $110 Million
"Between 9:36 and 9:43 pm on July 29th, all three of my wallets were completely drained." The post Hackers Figure Out a Trick to Steal Bitcoin From Cold Wallets, Grab $110 Million appeared first on Futurism .
Hackers managed to steal over $100 million worth of Bitcoin from numerous supposedly protected "cold" wallets operated by Canada-based firm Coinkite. Despite clients possessing a physical hardware key, intended to offer near impenetrable security, hackers exploited a software vulnerability to extract the funds. One victim, Johnathan Goodman, reported that his three wallets were drained within a span of three minutes.
According to crypto insights firm Galaxy Research, approximately $110 million worth of Bitcoin was stolen from around 5,000 wallets last week, the number rising to at least 7,300 by Monday. This incident underscores the ongoing security issues within the largely unregulated cryptocurrency industry. Coinkite, in response to the breach, warned customers on July 30 about hackers exploiting a software bug that enabled the reconstruction of wallet "seed phrases," serving as master keys for offline or "cold" wallets.
The company assured it was working to determine the full extent of the losses and conducting a post-mortem. However, Coinkite declined to disclose the scale of the losses, stating they couldn't independently verify the figures reported by third parties. The firm initiated a system-wide security audit which uncovered "numerous critical bugs in key software systems across the ecosystem using frontier AI models."
As a result of the incident, Coinkite has temporarily suspended its automated data-blanking process, retaining customer records for the time being to comply with legal obligations.
Written by urgent.news from Futurism's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — it may contain errors, so check the original before relying on it.
