This just happened to a friend of mine too, a substantial amount of bitcoins lost from an instawallet account a few hours after sending them there.
The only device used to access instawallet was an iphone that he had control over at all times between first accessing the account and the theft, so there is only two possibilities here:
- There is an iphone wallet stealer trojan or similar in the wild.
- Instawallet was hacked or the theft was internal.
My advice is to not use this kind of service, use something where only you can control the private keys to eliminate one risk factor.
If you need to use instawallet or similar services, send the coin somewhere more secure as fast as possible.
There are numerous possibilities, unfortunately and AFAIK, nobody notified the support about this problem. And without any way to identify the wallet there is obviously no way for me to investigate. Let's have a look at the facts before starting to guess.
People debating about the security of wifi forget that the traffic is SSL-encrypted anyway.
wtf. That's like humongeously stupid... instawallet. Or am I not getting something?
I'll add as a kind reminder that SSL sits on top of TCP but under HTTP, meaning that the secret URL is never sent in clear over the internet.
Please don't forget what about ssl encryption:
*snip*
@mattypoo yeah I noticed your edit, and I don't think you understand how wardriving works. I don't really care to educate you on the ins and outs of the subject; but a good wardriver isn't 'sniffing' just one ssl encrypted site. People use the same password for other sites too
Just...understand that some people are more creative than you. Just because you think you're safe doesn't mean you are; at all.
There is nothing common about common sense.
Never doubt the stupidity of people. Just because a direct route of information is ssl encrypted does not mean every place he could have sent relevant information is encrypted as well. Information gathering is key to an operation, and if the reward is high enough plenty of these 'hackers' would spend enough time to not only gather info from unencrypted data, but also try to get a keylogger or any other type of malicious software onto the victims computer. If the reward is high enough, the difficulty doesn't matter; It is only a matter of time. Is it the easiest possibility? No, so occam's razor applied you might find that it is a simple case of misplaced coins from a fallible human being.
Just please don't think the use of one ssl encrypted site means much to a dedicated wardriver. Trust me; it doesn't.