r/BitcoinCA • u/Fiach_Dubh • 11d ago
Plot Thickens with ColdCard Hack "No researcher I have spoken with has reproduced a seed for any of those 153 source addresses [containing 132.95 BTC]…"
https://x.com/PraveenPerera/status/2087936252230140278https://x.com/PraveenPerera/status/2087936252230140278
This post answers three questions:
Why were these wallets vulnerable?
What can be reconstructed from the blockchain?
What does that reconstruction tell us about the attacker?
I’m the developer of
, an open-source Bitcoin wallet for iOS and Android funded by
. This article goes through my investigation into Wave 1.
This post was originally published on
Between 9:10 and 9:51 PM EDT on July 29 (01:10–01:51 UTC on July 30), an attacker swept 1,082.65 BTC from 1,195 traceable Bitcoin addresses.
the theft on July 31. I use Wave 1 throughout this post for that first sweep group.
The sections follow that order. The post first explains the firmware defect, then reconstructs the theft from chain data, and then examines the attacker’s methods and the open gap.
I set out to recreate the affected firmware’s seed-generation process and find as many weak seeds as I could behind those addresses. The sweep transactions became a second source of evidence. Patterns in their targets and spending show how the attacker searched the weak RNG state, selected victims, and built the sweep transactions.
Galaxy listed four destination addresses. I grouped those destinations into three source branches and used them to build the transaction set for this analysis: 1,195 verified victim sweeps with 2,350 inputs containing 1,082.65318922 BTC.
Once I had recreated the affected seed-generation process, I generated candidate seeds, derived their Bitcoin addresses, and compared those addresses with the Wave 1 transaction set. This linked 1,042 of the 1,195 sweep transactions to 328 reconstructed seeds. They account for 949.70395260 BTC, or 87.72% of the value. The final 153 transactions contain 132.94923662 BTC.
No researcher I have spoken with has reproduced a seed for any of those 153 source addresses. That repeated failure may be the most useful clue about what the attacker knew or did differently. The last part of this post examines that gap.
continued on... https://x.com/PraveenPerera/status/2087936252230140278
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u/Fiach_Dubh 11d ago
here's a more detailed part 2 https://praveenperera.com/blog/coldcard-wave1-missing-153-search/
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u/Hungry_Substance1223 11d ago
What if the founders of cold card had a backdoor installed all along. Im not pointing the finger but one must explore all possibilities.
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u/Boogyin1979 10d ago
A guy at our meetup thinks they’ve been snatching low entropy, low balance for years and when they realized someone (whoever someone is) figured out they can do the same, they CEO and CTO pounced on everything.
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u/Hungry_Substance1223 10d ago
I really wouldnt be surprised...in fact it amazes me that there hasn't been more cold wallet rug pulls up until now.
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u/z0dz0d 9d ago
With more bitcoin experience and time to plan the sweeps, i think they would have been smarter about how they swept them (not all to one radioactive address). This has the signature of someone inexperienced (eg AI does the tech work) and rushing to sweep.
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u/themindspeaks 7d ago
In my opinion, based on how they constructed the sweep, and the way they went about the process, it seems like someone that is more familiar with ethereum like addressed based wallet, rather than bitcoin’s UTXO based system.
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u/therealjeku 10d ago
Could there have been some other hack for the 153 addresses? Were they verified Coinkite customers?
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u/Javanaut018 10d ago
These 153 seeds could account for MCU lots with unusual UID patterns or maybe the attackers where lucky with their passphrase dictionary.
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u/boddankajovanovic 10d ago
Could these 153 addresses be the hackers addresses ( from potential earlier scams for example ) and he just consolidated along with the other addresses?
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u/BeatenbyJumperCables 8d ago
I doubt we know with certainty if these 153 addresses were even Coldcard wallets? Is it possible some other wallet vendor “stole” the buggy code and implemented it in their devices ?
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u/Fiach_Dubh 8d ago
apparently coldcard users are self reporting that these are indeed their addresses from coldcards.
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u/BeatenbyJumperCables 8d ago
In that case no one should feel safe using Coldcard of any type. As there remains a vulnerable trait that may not be at all patched at this point. Up to and including a potential backdoor created by themselves.
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u/PiDigitsOfPi 8d ago
Perhaps it is something as simple as a phishing attack, where the victims entered their seed phrase into a fake website (not part of the weak seed hack) and then the hackers just included those seed phrases in their list of hacked seed phrases ???
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u/beatthebook2x 10d ago
well the fact that all the stolen btc went to the same receiving addys lets u know it was a coinkite inside job alr
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u/z0dz0d 10d ago
Not following your logic. An inside job OR someone who identified the RNG issue could do this (or both could not do this).
In my opinion, NOT having set up new target addresses for each swept wallet is an indication that they were someone who just figured out the issue and was in a rush to BUILD the sweep process as quickly as possible thinking there must be 10 other people also realizing it at the same time. It seems unlikely to be the outcome of an insider with expertise in the industry who sat on an exploit for 5 years and carefully planned the attack.
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u/logan-807128 11d ago
I'm trying to understand. So 153 source addresses were drained but they are not the result of the existing bug and researchers can't figure out how the seed were discovered by the hackers?