Topic: I just got hacked - any help is welcome! (25,000 BTC stolen) - page 13. (Read 381810 times)

The story seems to lack credibility, but never let truth ruin a good story.

What I found most interesting is how anyone in their right mind will store 25K BTC on a work computer.
Another alarming fact is that the original poster thinks that an investigation will cost more than the money he lost. That was his reply given earlier when he was asked if he would have some expert IT investigator look at it.


There are two sayings I would like to quite in this case.

1. A fool and his money is easily parted.
2. If it's in the news, it must be true, even if it originated from a forum post...

If the oddities in this case are actually real and the original poster actually lost these money, I am sorry I cannot feel sorry for him. In general I never like it when people are getting robbed or exploited, but some people just had it coming.

Analogies are the blond in super tight sexy outfit that walks alone in a dangerous neighborhood at 03:30 at night and get raped, or the porche owner going for shopping and leaving the car with both the doors open. It is still wrong for other people to exploit this, by all means, but it will happen, no doubt about it.

If the original topic poster is for real, sorry to say, but you are incredibly stupid. I have lost shitloads of money myself earlier on, not on bitcoin though, so I know the sinking suicidal feeling, but as they say, the strong survive..

For those that missed it (or maybe I just missed the link), this story is on Slashdot.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/06/16/1244205/500000-Worth-of-Bitcoins-Stolen

Yes..I tried to correct myself before a comment like this...agreed. 


Yes, better.  Again, nothing personal.  I don't know you...in fact, that's kinda the point.

Honestly, I have better things to do with my time.

I'm making such kits for a few of my old college roommates who trust me.  While I'm making them, I can crank out a few more.  But clearly, if you have $500K in Bitcoins, for heaven's sake don't be so lazy as to trust some anonymous person on the internet!  Frankly I don't want that sort of responsibility.  I don't want you coming after me if the method fails!

But if you're trying to stash a few hundred bucks for a rainy day, trusting some stranger on the internet isn't that far fetched.  Heck, unless you read and understood every line of code in Bitcoin client AND Linux AND your PC's firmware AND the C++ compiler AND the libraries, you are trusting someone!

So, unless you are desperate, please don't contact me.  I'm just trying to help people out, but I'd much rather not have the responsibility!

(is that better?)

Are you not concerned about bitrot?  You have only 1 single copy of your wallet on a single thumbdrive?  That is really dangerous for long-term storage.  If I had any sizeable amount of BTC (as I presume you do) I would not feel very warm and fuzzy abou this.

Before someone starts trolling...trust is the lynch-pin of every security system essentially....i meant specifically the social trust suggested by jerfelix.

No, it doesn't.  A user can create a new wallet.dat file on an unconnecte machine (by installing and starting the client, then shutting the client back down safely) copy the receiving address that the client produces onto any medium, copying the wallet.dat file onto a cheap thumbdrive, put the thumbdrive into a safe, and send coins from his mybitcoin.com account to the receiving address into the indefinate future.  This is pretty much what I do for my long term savings, as I have just such a setup.  I have a special address in my mybitcoin.com addressbook called "savings" that I send my overage to, and I don't have to take my thumbdrive out of the safe to do it.


This requires the wallet.dat file.

I am not questioning your integrity personally, but if someone were to take you up on your offer, it automatically makes what you are selling completely worthless (ie. complete wallet security.)  That person could never be secure and with certain knowledge that another copy of his wallet is not out there in the ether somewhere..."trust" should never be a lynch-pin of ANY security system (at least it need not be.)

I like the method though.

I'm no expert, but I've made comments elsewhere about key management in the current client. It seems that in practice, this is one area of the software that has proven to be a decided weak point. It does not yet have the polish of the rest of the system or the protocol.

In the above: while your wallet file wouldn't have to touch the outside world, the private-key in question would. So in a compromised machine, the entire balance attached at least to this key would become potentially vulnerable, and I think that is what you were saying. So the object would be...keep a system of securely generated savings keys and distributed "deposit" payments such that losing the balance of any single key is tolerable.

All the "help BTC lost/stolen" posts I've read here seem to have this common thread of either getting tripped up by a non-obvious-to-the-lay-user way in which wallet.dat works, or (possibly) getting unsecured private key material pinched by malware (I haven't read the earlier posts in this thread, but what I have read does not yet include any substantial evidence of any specific attack mechanism actually in use, so I'm guessing inadvertent user mishandling of wallet.dat is far more prevalent.

I hope the dev's don't try to re-invent the wheel when addressing future improvements to wallet.dat. I guess encryption of this file is a priority for a future release. I'm hoping that's only a stopgap to calm things down while the development effort struggles to catch up to usage needs.

It's my amateur opinion that wallet.dat needs to be rethought entirely.

I much prefer the notion to key management employed by GnuPG. All key material can be independently generated and addressed. The user interface provides you with total control over all aspects of your key material. Public vs. private key material are segregated within the software and are aggregated onto separate "keyring" files, allowing discriminating treatment, if paranoia/safety concerns dictate.

Plus, they do some clever things with the private key material, like encrypting it and using a cipher with a long setup time (i think it's BLOWFISH), so that brute-force passphrase searches are made impossible (as it takes a non-trivial amount of compute time to setup the cipher after supplying a test key).

Anyway...they do it VERY well, and in much use it's proven to be quite safe and reliable. The defaults are sensible to keep newbies out of serious trouble, but the power-users have ready access exacting control without resorting to weird kludges outside of the UI.

The anonymity features of wallet.dat could (and probably ought) to be built on top of a more GnuPG-like implementation of key management. And, I don't think this should be on by default. Rather, client-software documentation or a pretty UI section could explain the mechanism and what it's implications would be, and the user can then opt-in.

I keep mentally coming back to the picture of having others sign ownership of BTC over to me by using my public key, and my spending that BTC to others by signing ownership over to them with my private key. If I want/need more accounts, I can make more keys. But let me do it. Don't keep me guessing about what the software is doing with the key material under the hood.

Anyone with experience with GnuPG or any OpenPGP platform could just sit down with Bitcoin and know what to do, and how to stay secure about it.

Again, no expert, but my understanding is it might be the case that some element of transaction history is also stored within wallet.dat. In my view, these should be separated. Something is causing me to feel that keys shouldn't mix with receipts, not because it's dangerous, but because there may be some negative impacts for proper key handling.

The current client is sort of analogous to a car where new keys for the ignition are being made inside the steering wheel as you drive, linked to the odometer. You have to be sure to take the whole steering wheel with you when you get out, or you might find yourself not just locked out of the car, but unable to ever start it again! Oh, so you have a key backup that unlocks the door? Great... But the ignition key was changed inside the wheel while you were driving. Shall I call a cab?

Run a different OS on the downloading machine and the target. If the downloader is infected, it likely won't touch the target.

Since a wallet file is really just a collection of private keys, it seems as though keeping a text file with a collection of private key/address pairs would make just as much sense, if not more sense, than a wallet.dat file itself.  Send varying amounts of BTC to each address, and keep track of the addresses on another computer so you can check them for balances in blockexplorer.  Then, once PK importing is implemented into the client, you can simply import the private key relating to the address that you wish to "withdraw" from your savings wallet.  That way, your wallet file never has to touch the outside world, even to withdraw.  The most you ever risk is the amount related to a particular savings address, which can be limited or spread across more or less addresses based on how paranoid you are.

The way to secure a wallet isn't by your laughable Rube Goldberg machine.

Generate a wallet on a dedicated airgapped machine, write down some of its addresses, encrypt the wallet and back up the encrypted file. Then send BTC to the addresses.

See how that works? Now you have a bank from which you can make withdrawals to smaller wallets. Use your brain to figure out how.

Christ. How hard can this be?

It's amateur hour at forum.bitcoin.org...

You're right of course. I don't possess anything worth stealing. It makes life quite easy. On the other hand, if I had 25,000 Bitcoins I would create a wallet on a device that has never been connected, and will never be connected, to the internet, and then I would encrypt it, and then I would make several back ups. I guess I could pay a bank, but when it's so easy, why bother. Netbooks are $300 bucks. That's what, 15 BTC at the current exchange rate? Cheap bank if you ask me.

Perhaps, or most likely you have nothing of value that anyone wants to steal in the first place.  If you had a 25,000 bitcoin account it would be a different story.  I would guess allanvain would gladly place his bitcoins in a bank to protect them for a fee if there were such a thing.

Bullshit. It points out the fundamental flaw in people's ability to protect themselves. Probably because they've been relying on other people to do it for them for far too long. Bitcoin banks and insurance companies will come about that make Bitcoin as safe as any other property. But these securities come with a price. I'd rather not pay the price, because I am perfectly capable of securing my own property. Thankfully with Bitcoin, it's my choice.

Wow, if this story is indeed true I commend you on handling the situation and not killing yourself.  Dealing with such a huge financial loss, especially through thievery and being a victim must be very difficult.  The only solace I can think of is that the bitcoins you created were gathered in such an unskilled means that you can think of it as easy come easy go.

This points out the fundamental flaw of a currency with no central authority, no laws and no punishment for thievery.  Bitcoin will never be a popular currency in its current form because it is simply to easy to steal peoples bitcoins with no recourse.  People may hate governments but any fraud or thievery dealing with money is dealt with very well.  If you had converted your bitcoins to money you would have been much safer.

To safeguard against wallet theft the measures are quite simple.  Buy multiple brand new computers for your wallet files and only use them for your wallet transactions.  Use a totally separate internet connection (ISP, routers) for wallet machines.  Only store as much as you intend to lose in an attack on each dedicated wallet machine, so in your case have 5 machines each with 5,000 bitcoins in them, if one machine is compromised somehow the most you stand to lose is 5,000.  Use different OSes for each wallet machine so that they are not as likely to be all compromised in the same manner.

It is just now that I'm this paranoid. I used to trust the bitcoin client and the various mining programs. Now I don't think I can trust anything bitcoin related except perhaps what I have no choice but to trust which is the official bitcoin client.

Hmm, this is a pretty good idea. I totally forgot about LinuxCoin.

I could also boot into linuxcoin just to download the bitcoin client onto a trusted (new) usb stick.

Download a client from Bitcoin.org with a fresh OS and transfer with a USB key. I'm still using a client several versions back. Yes, if the client is compromised there is nothing you can do. But wow, how can you think this paranoid and still be the victim of a 25,000 BTC theft? Or is it that you are just now thinking this paranoid? Paranoid is a bad word for me to use, it's actually being prepared.


Basically this is what I'm saying. But this device will never connect to the internet. It doesn't need to. It's for savings only.