❌

Normal view

Hackers Figure Out a Trick to Steal Bitcoin From Cold Wallets, Grab $110 Million

8 August 2026 at 12:30

Hackers made away with more than $100 million worth of Bitcoin from thousands of supposedly secured “cold” wallets hosted by Canada-based company Coinkite.

As Bloomberg reports, the hackers managed to infiltrate the wallets despite clients having a physical hardware key associated with their accounts, which was supposed to provide nearly impenetrable security.

“The moment it loaded I knew I was screwed because I saw red lines for withdrawals,” one of the victims, Johnathan Goodman, told Bloomberg. “Between 9:36 and 9:43 pm on July 29th, all three of my wallets were completely drained.”

Crypto insights company Galaxy Research estimated that around $110 million worth of Bitcoin had been drained from around 5,000 wallets last week, a figure that grew to at least 7,300 by Monday.

The incident highlights persistent lapses in security plaguing the largely unregulated cryptocurrency industry.

In the case of Coinkite, it was a particularly egregious lapse in security. The firm warned its customers on July 30 that hackers were exploiting a software bug that allowed them to reconstruct wallet “seed phrases,” which are sequences of random words that act as a master key to “cold” — or offline — wallets.

Coinkite promised in an email to Bloomberg in a followup story that it was racing to get a full picture of the embarrassing situation, saying it was working on “helping affected customers.” However, the company refused to estimate the scale of the losses, vowing to conduct a “post-mortem” at an unspecified future date.

“We’re not in a position to independently confirm total losses or validate the specific figures being reported by third parties,” the company told Bloomberg. “We won’t speculate on a number we can’t verify directly.”

The company also kicked off an “ongoing ecosystem-wide security audit” which has revealed “numerous critical bugs in key software systems across the ecosystem using frontier AI models.”

The cryptocurrency firm has since gone into full damage control mode as it investigates the major slipup.

In an “update on customer data retention” published on its website today, the company said that “due to legal obligations arising from the security incident, including the preservation of records that may be relevant to ongoing and anticipated legal proceedings, we have temporarily suspended our automated data-blanking process.”

“This means that customer records that would otherwise have been blanked under our standard schedule will be retained until further notice,” the company wrote.

More on crypto: Trump Boasts That He Can Profit Off Presidency as Much as He Wants: “I Found Out That Nobody Cared”

The post Hackers Figure Out a Trick to Steal Bitcoin From Cold Wallets, Grab $110 Million appeared first on Futurism.

Recovery Seeds Reportedly Breached for Coldcard Hardware Bitcoin Wallets, $75M Taken

2 August 2026 at 02:48
"A hardware wallet is supposed to be the safest place to keep Bitcoin," writes The Street, since it never connects to the internet, its keys never leave the device, and "the whole point is that an attacker would need to physically hold it to steal anything." The problem is that anyone who can reproduce the recovery seed doesn't need to possess the COLDCAR, Nerds.xyz points out. More from The Street: [The recovery seed] is supposed to come from a hardware random number generator producing 128 bits of entropy, a number so large that guessing it is computationally impossible. It wasn't. According to Block's engineering team a single code change on March 1, 2021 caused the firmware to silently fall back to a software-based generator instead of the hardware one. On Mk3 devices the effective search space collapsed to roughly 40 bits. Coinkite has confirmed that figure and called it preliminary. The gap between 128 bits and 40 bits is not a matter of degree. It is the difference between a lock that cannot be picked and one that can be brute-forced by anyone with rented cloud computing.... Chainalysis found the attacker went after the largest balances first, pulling more than $30 million in the opening ten minutes. Within about 25 minutes, roughly 594 BTC had moved out of some 500 single-signature wallets. One victim lost around $1.8 million... Coinkite has shipped fixed firmware, but with a warning that matters more than the patch itself. Updating does not repair an existing seed. A seed created with weak entropy stays weak forever. Affected users have to generate an entirely new wallet on updated hardware and move their coins to it. By Saturday morning Galaxy research was tracking 1,158.66 BTC, worth roughly $75.1 million, taken from 2,673 addresses, according to the article. And "The Coldcard exploit is ONGOING," Galaxy Research posted an hour ago on X.com. "Move Coldcard single-sig funds to safe locations immediately!" We have reported ~600 addresses we believe to be hackers holding funds stolen from Coldcard-generated weak entropy addresses to federal investigators, industry compliance firms, and cross-industry cyber investigators. Thanks to Slashdot reader BrianFagioli for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple faces lawsuit over fake Bitcoin wallet left on App Store after massive losses

28 July 2026 at 18:00

Apple logo

Apple is facing a new lawsuit accusing the company of allowing a fraudulent Bitcoin wallet app to remain on its App Store for more than a week after users reported significant losses.

According to the complaint, three individuals collectively lost approximately $1.84 million after downloading an app that impersonated the legitimate Sparrow Wallet. The victims entered their Bitcoin seed phrases into the fake application, enabling scammers to drain their funds. One plaintiff reported losing $875,000, while another lost $840,000; the delay in removing the app after the first report allegedly contributed to further losses.

The lawsuit claims Apple’s marketing and App Store presentation led users to believe applications available on the platform undergo careful vetting and are safe. Plaintiffs allege the company ranked the fraudulent app and even included it in curated cryptocurrency app collections alongside genuine Bitcoin wallets. The legal action accuses Apple of violating consumer-protection laws, engaging in fraudulent and negligent misrepresentation, and failing to adequately warn consumers about risks.

This is not the first time Apple has faced similar claims. In 2021, cryptocurrency holders sued the company over a fake wallet app scam; that case was ultimately dismissed by a federal judge.

Apple has stated that it has removed apps impersonating Sparrow Wallet from the App Store and terminated the associated developer accounts.

MacDailyNews Note: The plaintiffs are seeking reimbursement of the stolen assets along with compensatory and punitive damages.


‎
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!

Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.

The post Apple faces lawsuit over fake Bitcoin wallet left on App Store after massive losses appeared first on MacDailyNews.

Eric Trump Has Lost $600 Million of Daddy’s Money Betting on Crypto

10 July 2026 at 13:53

President Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump, cofounded a crypto mining venture called American Bitcoin Corp last year — and it’s already in deep trouble.

As the Bitcoin community reels from a major downturn — the digital currency has plummeted by over 40 percent year to date — the company’s shares have plummeted right along with it, crashing over a whopping 95 percent compared to their peak.

On Wednesday, its stock price hit an all-time low of well under $6, down from a high of $140 last autumn.

That means Eric Trump’s six percent stake in the company has lost more than $600 million in market value, per Bloomberg‘s calculations, a bruising crypto play that perfectly illustrates the enormous risks of going all-in on extremely volatile digital assets.

After merging with an existing mining company, the company made the questionable decision last year to pivot from building data centers — an extremely lucrative industry that has seen massive interest as of late — to crypto mining, a gambling-like practice that’s far from guaranteed to make a profit.

Since then, the crypto world has had a rude awakening. As prices plunged, the industry made a sharp turn towards leasing all of that hardware to AI companies instead of mining Bitcoin.

However, American Bitcoin stuck to its guns, ultimately going down with the ship. Most of its assets are tied up in crypto-mining hardware and Bitcoin holdings, meaning it didn’t really have anywhere to run.

Eric Trump, meanwhile, is doubling down.

“Thrilled to announce American Bitcoin crossing the 8,000 BTC mark!” he gloated in a July 7 tweet. “The stacking continues.”

He also argued that it would be “beyond catastrophic” to sell its holdings during a recent podcast episode.

Despite Trump’s enthusiasm, American Bitcoin lost well over $100 million in the first quarter of this year. Whether the tide will turn and crypto will see another rise in value is ultimately a question of belief.

“Just hold on guys, just hold,” Eric Trump warned during this year’s Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas.

The elder Trump appears to have fared far better, reporting last week that he had made more than $1.4 billion in income from his family’s crypto ventures in 2025 — an astronomical conflict of interest, considering we’re talking about the president of the United States.

More on Trump and crypto: Trump Fans Confused by How Their Investments in His Crypto and Stock Are Now Worth a Tiny Fraction While He’s Getting Richer

The post Eric Trump Has Lost $600 Million of Daddy’s Money Betting on Crypto appeared first on Futurism.

Bitcoin Has Lost Nearly Half Its Value in 11 Months

14 June 2026 at 12:34
The price of bitcoin dropped 13% down to $64,394 just in June — but there's more bad news, reports CNBC." "Bitcoin has lost nearly half its value since reaching a record high above $123,000 in July 2025." While previous bitcoin selloffs were often followed by large rebounds in price, the latest decline may prompt some investors to revisit why they own bitcoin in the first place, [says Daniel Sotiroff, associate director of ETF and Passive Strategies Research at Morningstar]. Here's what he and other experts have to say about the case for holding crypto, and how much exposure is appropriate for the average investor... Not all financial professionals agree bitcoin belongs in a portfolio. Bitcoin differs from stocks, bonds and real estate because it doesn't generate earnings, interest payments or rental income that investors can use to estimate its value, says Robert Johnson, a finance professor at Creighton University. Instead, its price is largely determined solely by investor demand. "You cannot invest in Bitcoin, you can only speculate," he says. Sotiroff agrees that bitcoin is difficult to value using traditional financial metrics. "The best analogy I've heard is that it's more like a collectible, because it's basically worth what other people are going to pay for it," he says. Sotiroff told CNBC the recent selloff was a reminder that bitcoin's gains can be accompanied by equally dramatic declines — one reason many financial planners recommend limiting exposure to a small portion of a broader portfolio. "You just really can't make a call on what direction it's going to go," says Sotiroff.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

❌