Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89M(www.coindesk.com)

40 pointsby rbanffy4 hours ago2 comments

teravor3 hours ago
the thief appears sloppy in how they stole the coins. multiple waves, linking outputs together etc.
paulpauper4 hours ago
The bigger disaster is awaiting. hackers are now reviewing source code of everything crypto related for entropy or other misconfiguration bugs, automated with leading AI models , which will spot errors humans missed. We're talking wallets dating back to 2010 when btc was founded, and then for all the altcoins. Ppl don't realize how bad this will get when exploit detection can be done at scale with LLMs. Ai can review a codebase in minutes, which would take humans days, if ever. Coldcard is a tiny wallet service. A bigger one would have losses in excess of billions. A hacker will first find the vulnerability and then exhaust the keyspace and download the blockchain to cue up the keys and do it all at once .
- lern_too_spel4 hours ago
  Better now than later. It would have been even better a decade ago, but here we are.
  - frogperson2 hours ago
    Will this just trigger a crypto arms race? Bigger and tougher proof of work?
    patrickthebold42 minutes ago
    Unlikely. The digital signatures bitcoin uses are regarded as secure, (there could be attacks if we get quantum computers.) The issue here was the software didn't put in enough randomness when generating the keys, and so it was straight forward to search the small space of keys the wallet would generate.
    It's not so different if you encrypted a file with a weak password and someone guessed it—you don't need stronger encryption, you need to pick a better password.
    The proof of work part of bitcoin is really for "consensus", so everyone agrees which transactions happened in which order, this attack didn't affect that part at all.
    2 hours ago
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    andrewinardeer2 hours ago
    Need more GPUs.