Bitcoin Forum

I really feel like I want to puke and I'm shaking all over my body and can barely type.

I was just checking my wallet on blockchain and noticed that all my bitcoins were transfered to another account!

From the Details it happened yesterday.

I had made a brainwallet which i tought noone could have guessed and never put my private-key somewhere.

Please is there anything I can do or at least to make me feel better?
I just don't have a clue what to doaöäshefp9heWHFPAWHEFE

Very sad to hear. How much did you lost?

Please post the details. Especially, the transaction ID in blockchain. Since the robbery has been already committed, there is not much that we could do now. But still, if there is any chance of a recovery, then we can try.

Bummer man. But please do follow up with anything you learn about what happened. It may save someone else.  :-[

This was a very bad idea.  People don't need to "guess" a brainwallet.  Instead, they write computer programs that model human behavior and then generate all possible brainwallets that match a set of likely behaviors.  Depending on where and how you created the brainwallet, it is also possible that the brainwallet creating program stored a history of the brainwallets that it created so that the author of the program could steal the bitcoins at a future date.



Unfortunately recovery of the bitcoins is extremely unlikely.  There is a small chance that the thief is careless and reveals something about themselves that allows them to be identified. With subpoena power, there is a very small chance that the thief might try to use the bitcoins at a service that would supply you (or law enforcement) with the identity of the thief from their records.  Please don't take this to mean that there is any hope of recovery.  I offer this information only in the interest of being complete in my answer.  I don't want to instill you with false hope.

As a note to anybody else that comes across this thread:

Bitcoin is still experimental and is still a technology considered to be in beta test.  As such, it is very important that people don't hold more bitcoins than they can emotionally handle losing.  If a person would feel devastated to lose all their bitcoins (or if the exchange rate on their bitcoins were to drop to $0) then they have too much bitcoins.

So many worthless hackers hold so many Bitcoins.. I got in this to be protected from the theft that is inflation, but the thiefs here are 10 times worst.
Starting to lose faith in this, imagine the power these scums will have when a Bitcoin will be worth 20000$ or more :(

Worse?

There is absolutely nothing you can do to protect yourself against inflation if you hold an inflationary currency.

There is much you can do to protect yourself against the theft of bitcoins if you are willing to take the time to learn just a little bit.

Also, just so you are aware, the bitcoin supply is currently inflationary and will continue to be so for the lifetime of most people that are alive today. The supply of bitcoins should continue to increase until nearly the year 2140.

It is always saddening to hear about people loosing all their bitcoins. Brain wallets is a good idea in principle but is extremely difficult for us humans to think of a long phrase which is truly random. My advice is not to use them, and do not put all your coins in one address.

I know I can protect my Bitcoins, but the theft of coins from those who can't affect me too.
Imagine how much the value of gold would plummet if 10% of the world supply of it was stolen, and the economical power that the worthless looters would gain.
Still, Bitcoin is quite young and I believe it will survive this, but I'm really looking forward for a service like Coinbase to gain enough credibility in being able to properly secure the noobie's coins, and make cellphone 2fa obligatory. And you make a good point about there being no way to be protected against inflation. Thanks for your answer, it's just that seeing this kind of posts everyday depresses me a bit ;)

Sorry to hear the loss. It is not really a good idea to use brainwallet.

Can u please give us the Tx details ?

Sorry for your loss. did u scan for virus.

As Danny mentioned, passwords should contain no information. Do not include ANY words and no numbers that relate to you, such as an address. It should be a long password (at least 20 chars.) and use both cases as well as numbers and special chars. Using words leaves you open to a dictionary attack. You must force the thief to brute force your password and then make it so long that he can't. There are only like 80K English words in common use, all of them could be checked in seconds. 

For example: Ji$9iht5cR@09onUG7fcMg2&nSP

Rather than: myleetpassword

Sorry, there is nothing you can do.

The mistake you made was thinking that nobody would or could guess your password. No brain wallet is safe. There are 6 billion people in the world. What are the chances of one of them using the same password? What are the chances your password being guessed by any of the thousands of computers that are making millions of guesses every second? Both of those possibilities are very high. Any password that can be memorized can be guessed easily or accidentally.

what can I do with the transaction-id?
I know in cases like that some people are asking for it,
but I haven't heard of any recovery because of the transaction-id.
Just trying to understand for what it's good or use.

FYPFY

1st of all, I never heard of brain wallet. Why trust a wallet thats not established when there are options like blockchain?

The only recovery attempt would be contacting brain wallet and see if they can re-course that transaction with your story.

Tell them the details of what happened, and see if they can retrieve the balance it went to and take that balance which is very possible.

To make it faster, screen capture the balance gone, etc.

A brain wallet is not a web wallet as you are alluding to with Blockchain. It is this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Brainwallet

As far as security goes - just avoid using a brain wallet. It might be a cool idea but unless you have sufficient entropy your coins will be eventually stolen.

Sorry for your loss.

Brain wallets aren't safe because people are terrible at choosing random passphrases. Hopefully your mistake wasn't too expensive!

People are asking for the transaction id in order to look at the transaction that sent the coins from your wallet. There may be a clue to where the coins went and even a possibility that you haven't actually lost the coins. Don't hold your breath. If everything you wrote is accurate, then it is probably impossible for you to get your coins back.

Or at least tell us the address.

Provide a transaction ID?

Are we having a bot with paraphrasing skill?  ;D

op post transaction id so that users can track and prevent from buying btc from theif

Malware maybe? Tough luck

Had my bitcoins stolen from blockchain.info before twice but this was back in early 2013. It sucks and it feels like the world owes you a favor but you suck it up and move on learning your lesson. Always use 2factor Auth and long ass passwords!

And you, any idea how it happened?
Please share, this can be helpful for many.
And it looks like the world indeed gave you a favour with late-2013's massive bubble ;)

It was weird but I have no clue. 2 BTC along with other dozens of btc presumably from other blockchain accounts being moved into an address with hundreds of presumably stolen btc. Honestly? I'm not ruling out an inside job. I know how to secure my shit. Something was up with that.

That's quite a big accusation. Aren't you the sole owner of the private keys when holding a wallet on blockchain.info?
And perhaps it was phishing? The first link when searching blockchain on google was a phishing site last week.

People got e-mails with link to that fake site too!

Nah. No way! I troll phishing sites when I'm bored for Christ's sake and I use those emails to spam duck my enemies. Nah. Hmmmmm. I just don't know. Hackers...they suck.

Surely with the powerful computers in the world today, no password is safe, even a very long mixture of characters & numbers. Could any combination of these not be worked out eventually?

https://howsecureismypassword.net/

"It would take a desktop PC about
21 sexdecillion years
to crack your password"

hope you're right :)

won't try your link though, never intend to type my password into a computer which is connected to the internet! (well until I go to sell anyway).

Ofcourse you wont put your real passwor to it!
Just about same lenght and amount of number and letters ;)

yes, did that, looks good

sorry for your loss man, did you managed to find something more ?

I like that howsecureismypassword site. Would be funny if it had a keylogger or something built in or simply saved all entered passwords for later use.

It have been online like 2 years already, and nobody should but their real passoword anywhere anyway.
If your password would be 123Ngg! you could put ap?G842 there aswell and answer would be same.

It's not a great indicator of the security of your password in many ways; I typed in the 3 rows of letters on my keyboard, starting qwerty etc. I told me it would take 48 quintillion years to crack my password - I don't think so  ;D

Thats like worst example ever, I guess program got it just like 26 random charters.

Not much of an use if a mixer is used. If that is not the case, then you can track your coins.

Tough loss. Sorry man.

Sorry to hear your loss.
I am afraid there is not much you can do now. :(

posting tx id will help you track your coin and maybe the owner is in this forum as well
sorry for your loss but you didnt even gave enough details how much BTC you have lost
your BTC address and the theif address
this information will help you track where your coins is plus maybe can identify the theif because i guess all the people here in this forum post their BTC address

The OP hasn't made any posts here for the last 48 hrs. I think that he is gone.

or maybe he is just telling a lie

Security is paramount in crypto. All of the problems that cryptocurrency solves ie: quick and easy to send, no charge backs - Also make it easy to steal.

You have to be incredibly careful with your dough, it's like carrying around bars of gold on your person in a bad neighborhood, find a place safe to store it!

Or maybe the loss is just too devastating...

I don't think so. He hasn't posted his BTC address. So he is definitely not here to beg.

I see you are online so I will ask again:  if you want us to try and help you then post the transaction ID of the transaction that transferred the coins out of your account.  Otherwise we cannot help you.

It is very sad to hear this. Hope you didn't loose much

Sorry to hear.
Whatever you lost, it's the price of the lessons you just learned, I suppose.

Tough shit though.

Tough luck

Sadly no recovery hopes

I still can't believe what happened and feel like paralyzed.

Everyday after waking up and uncountable moments through my day I'm trying to figure out what happened and what I'm going to do now?!

I was thinking for a long time before making the decision to buy bitcoins,
and I said to myself I'm going to keep them for at least 2 years and I did not have the intention to sell them quickly whatever the price may be.

I had it in my exchange since I bought them and decided to move them out in the beginning of march,
because I was afraid something like GOX could happen.
Even though I had my 2factor authentication I wanted it to be more secure.

At that time I really believed it was more secure than keeping it in kraken which was my exchange.
I'm not an expert in Cryptocurrency,
but I thought I had some knowledge about computer and the internet,
so at that moment I really did it with the best of my abilities and knowledge.

I know I am the only one to blame for it
and in retrospective I should have gathered more information about securing bitcoins but I didn't.
And now I'm paying the price for my ignorance.

I'm fighting with myself in probably thousands of moments not to do something stupid because of that loss.
Then I'm trying to tell myself there are worse things that can happen,
but sometimes it just doesn't feel like it.

For some, that loss probably means not much,
but for me it really means a lot.

The reason why I was hesitating to give away details was,
I was realizing that there's nothing I can do anymore and nothing will bring it back.

Now I got encouraged to inform other people because the more I thought about it,
the more I have the desire to at least try to prevent something like that to ever happen again.
I really don't wish this to happen to anyone!
It is really an indescribable bad feeling.
If you're like me and something like that happens you probably will go to some dark places
and will consider making some stupid decisions…

sorry for my long post
I don't feel better now, but maybe I can raise some awareness towards the security of your bitcoins
and make some people think again about how they secure their bitcoins.


the last tx-id: 1787705d05dd56a9f1fada334a9da3b92d1f3f27169cc5d8595cb0a1a7cc5600

What was your passphrase?  You can at least spread the word for others to not use brainwallets.

never use brainwallet bro

i used "correct horse battery stable" (changed the p to a b) and they were gone in 3 seconds

it's like someone was looking specifically for a stable to connect the horse batteries together.     ;D

bummer ! >:(

"correct horse battery stable" is very well known password example so everyone knows it... bad choice.

http://xkcd.com/936/
https://github.com/brainwallet/brainwallet.github.com/commit/fa41e1a244c5c95ab588c53eae316852996f0da1
https://www.google.fi/search?q=correct+horse+battery+stable&oq=correct+horse+battery+stable&aqs=chrome..69i57&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8

Man, you seriosly used this???

Damn! 15 BTC!

How can this really have happened??

well what happened happened... You will get over it ... :) move on.

easy for you to say, you didn't lose all your bitcoins :D

As the acceptance increases, entropy will decrease and we will see more such cases.

why will entropy decrease?

There will be more and more brain wallets, so the chances will be higher that someone will stumble upon the same sentence.

i thought i'd seen 25 BTC
and even its 15 its a big damn loss :( just hope that the thef will hit by karma this month
have you tried to search the address in this forum?

Hence why you either dont use them OR use extremely long sentences which you wont remember so its not a brainwallet anymore.

Sorry to hear man, brain wallets are not a good idea if you are going to use an easy password.

Yup. Not a good idea at all. You're going through so much trouble creating it and in the end you're using easy password - how messed up is this.  ;)

http://s7.directupload.net/images/140408/rphleqfu.gif (http://www.directupload.net)

OK, I realize that caution has to be used with brainwallets, but what you say is overstating the case. The 12 word mnemonics that have 128 bits of entropy generated by Electrum and others can be memorized, and so can be used as brainwallets. They can't be feasibly brute forced or guessed. 

There are people that would have no problems memorizing 12 random words. Heck, there are a few people in the world that can memorize thousands of digits of pi.

But, don't expect most people to be able to do that.

OK fine, but I just want to point out that you kind of stress me out a little when you say "any brainwallet you can memorize can be cracked" because it makes me doubt my understanding of cryptography (because it implies that the 12 word randomly generated mnemonics in wide use are not strong enough).

Well it's obviously false that any brainwallet you can memorize can be cracked, because theoretically one could memorize a private key.  But you're not going to be remembering that in 6 months.

You and I have a very different idea of what the word "memorize" means.

Those 12 words are generally meant to be written down.

There are very few people in the world who can memorize a completely random set of 12 unrelated words and recall them all in exact order a decade or two later if they haven't used the set for anything in the meantime.

If you are capable of that, then you can use a passphrase generator that generates properly random sets of enough words, and then memorize it if you like.

The vast majority of people who are trying to create brainwallets, are trying to come up with something out of their own head that they have enough of a connection to that they believe that they will remember it after a significant amount of time has passed.  This is a VERY BAD idea.

*sigh* I'm not disputing that it's a bad idea. I just think it's possible to say "brainwallets are a bad idea for reasons X, Y, and Z, and here are examples of passphrases that would get cracked immediately and others that are considered safe (i.e., 12 randomly generated words following the electrum method)." I think most people have at least some intuition about what they are capable of memorizing, but very poor intuition for what makes a good, unfeasible to guess, private key.

It wont matter if he you can trace it, it can be mixed in easliy and not be traced also by trading it with litecoins, then he can sell lite coiins for cash

Hello, I'm brand new to this forum and to Bitcoin, and I wanted to thank you for this information. I wanted to ask you and everyone else what are some good tips to staying safe and to keep this from happening to me?

Posted From bitcointalk.org Android App

Welcome :)
This is most probably a great time to buy, congratulations on your timing.

IMHO, the best way to be safe would be to keep most of your Bitcoins in Coinbase for the first few months, and keep a small percentage in cold storage. When you're new with Bitcoin, the odds that you mess up by having your own wallet stolen are quite high, it takes some time to learn all that needs to be learnt to properly secure them. Coinbase has more experience than you with this, and they keep 97% of their coins in cold storage. They have been audited recently and have proven that they did not lose any coins since their debut. Also, with all the investors that are involved with it, the odds are high that they will refund you if your bitcoins get stolen because of them.

If after a few months the coins you kept in cold storage are still safe and you feel you've learnt enough about security, it will be time to transfer the Coinbase coins to it :)

Good luck and have fun - it feels great to be able to truly control one's own money.
(even periods of crisis like this are exciting, if you're here for the long term ;) )

It is indeed a good time to buy as previous poster stated. But remember it's an investment, so don't invest anything you can't afford to lose.
There are loads of threads with tips on security and being safe, mainly in the beginners and help section.

Best of luck.

Thanks, for everyone who added to this thread. I`m fairly new at this whole bitcoin thing, so this helped a lot.

Good luck in the future. Do not hesitate to use Beginners & Help section for
future questions. Lots of people around here willing to help the newcomers! :)

Glad to see some good came from a terrible situation.  Always sucks to think of someone losing their hard earned coins.