Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89 million
A series of cyberattacks targeting Bitcoin cold-wallet addresses has resulted in the theft of approximately $89 million from 4,585 victims. The attacks exploit a 2021 firmware vulnerability that allows attackers to predict seed generation, with the latest wave showing more sophisticated obfuscation techniques.
Why it matters
This incident highlights significant security risks in cryptocurrency storage and the importance of hardware wallet firmware integrity.
Galaxy Research flagged a third wave of sweeps early Sunday, roughly 208 bitcoin drained from 1,912 addresses between Friday midday and Saturday morning UTC.
That is just over a tenth of a bitcoin per victim. The July 30 opening wave averaged close to a full coin, 1,083 bitcoin from 1,196 addresses in 41 minutes.
Observed losses across all three waves now total 1,367 bitcoin, nearly $89 million, from 4,585 addresses.
Wave three sends each victim’s coins to its own destination rather than the handful of shared collector addresses that made the first two easy to map, and parks them in pay-to-witness-script-hash outputs, a format that can carry multisignature or timelock conditions, instead of the plain single-key outputs used before.
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