Bitcoin Forum

Today I saw that my offline wallet is empty.  :'(
Someone has transferred all my 10 BTC.  :'(

Status: 260 confirmations
Date: 7/16/2014 22:28
To: 1C1qWEU2xrh7CTFWVxohs9JzFiLDC6bXMs
Debit: -10.00 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.0001 BTC
Net amount: -10.0001 BTC
Transaction ID: b1de73c8ffd10d31f9e2fecf93b4d0afe4b3e0a2ec75fb1ef72ae7671a747c29


Can anyone give me some advice on what to do please?

How could this happen?

Nobody has physical access to my computer.

My backup wallet is on usb flash in safe place.

Well you are fucked that's for sure.

are you sure your computer not installed any keylogger/malware?
i saw the tx and i'm sure the hacker already mixed that BTC
so sad for you

Define offline wallet in this case? A wallet stored on an USB drive as in cold storage or?

even when you have a backup ...  ::) if you run a client with the official wallet, attack can stealth money (backdoor in dropbox, classic theme).




COLD STORAGE is to save wallet.dat in a USB key (or other) ... and ERASE bitcoin-core and wallet.dat from the computer.



note : you can simply erase wallet.dat and use bitcoin-core with the "node" command line. Then, when you have to quickly do a operation on wallet.dat ... shutdown bitcoin-core, delete command line of "node" function ... and replace the wallet.dat file in the good place.

Meuh when you say node command line, do you mean enter "node" in the debug/cmd line ?
I have not used bitcoin-core as I am using a slightly older version. I havn't seen the node command before, maybe my version does not have it but either way I am going to have a look on google/wiki for it now. thanks for that :)

I was pretty bored tonight so this will entertain me for 8 minutes of playing around.

I can see uR fund was distributed among the following addresses...


It makes me believe that u were not using paper wallet. Can u please tell us which client u were using ?

Did you encrypt your offline wallet?

The offline wallet is "Bitcoin Core"

-disablewallet         Do not load the wallet and disable wallet RPC calls
 -maxconnections=<n>    Maintain at most <n> connections to peers (default: 125)

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin#Command-line_arguments

use 12 connexions ... to not kill the upload speed.

It is not an offline wallet (cold storage) if it was created on a computer connected to the internet.

To prevent those attacks you should have followed this guide:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_to_set_up_a_secure_offline_savings_wallet

OP still hasn't really given us any useful information.

OP how did you create your offline wallet and what type of offline. And when did you create it? How have you been using your offline wallet adding and removing bits and how frequently?

It's really not difficult anymore to keep your coins secure. I'm suspicious too.

lol this idiot has no idea what offline wallet means.


He thinks not running btc core means offline

"My backup wallet is on usb flash in safe place. " - but did u erase the wallet.dat from appdata/roaming/bitcoin ?

there is no point in moving wallet.dat to cold storage if u didnt remove it.
Anyways, if you had password on your wallet, and are not trolling, the you picked up a trojan/wallet stealer.

Im pretty sceptical about your story tho.

cheers

This thread makes me nervious... I created a.... offlineish wallet...  It is currently offline but.. this is what I did..

New hard drive, install windows, install BTC-QT, encrypt, send BTC to wallet, back up wallet to many USB's remove hard drive.

Odds of me getting screwed are..?!

*Edit*

Oh ya.. I removed the hard drive from my computer and put my normal one back.

I think u had your coins in Bitcoin Core and u just made a copy of it offline thinking this is a offline storage. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I think some of your wallet copy has remained online, which was stolen through malware. Please accept it as a lesson and dont download anything from unknown sources.

Can u please tell us if u have downloaded any alt coin client in last 7 days ?

U have chances to get screwed in my opinion. At the time of backup u may have left traces in devices connected online. A better way for offline storage is...

1. create a blockchain.info account with only one address

2. send your wealth there

3. just download the paper wallet and print out

4. remove all traces of your blockchain.info password

p.s. Well, please make sure that your PC is not already infected by malware or keylogger.

There have been lots of stolen coins these days i can see a thread created by klee which he lost about 1700BTC and thats more than 50x to yours and right now he still haven't got it back.

Thats a pretty nasty response to what might be have been quite a legitimate misunderstanding. Im sure there is a lot you don't know and hope people in your life don't treat you like you treated this guy, because that sucks.

Sorry to hear your loss, looks like you're snookered  :(

Loaded VIA usb, alas I don't think I disconnected from web.

call Bitcoin Customer Service (1-888-BIT-COIN).

they'll fix your account in a jiffy

That wasn't very nice.

Klee's wallet wasn't offline or secure.

So the main lesson here is dont put into BTC what you can't afford to lose.  I haven't heard of any BTC theives being brought to justice, so for now beware of any way of storing your BTC.

On another note, Coinbase does have a new "vault" storage feature which delays withdrawals and requires multiple confirmations that you are in fact making the withdrawal.  Sounds like a good idea for long term storage!

He didn't mention about having password or wallet encrypted. I believe that's the main reason.

I basically use these steps for my cold storage (offline wallet).  

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_to_set_up_a_secure_offline_savings_wallet

I add my own methods like downloading the HTML from  bitcoinpaperwallet (https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com/bitcoinpaperwallet/generate-wallet.html) or bitcoinaddress (http://bitcoinaddress.org) and PGP encrypting the addresses files and encapsulating within TrueCrypt.  Also read up on how to securely delete files so that they are unrecoverable.

Whatever you do, don't trust Windows. If your private address comes in contact with an online instance of Windows, consider it potentially compromised.

Wow, very sorry to hear this. Best of luck!

These stories made me extremely worried. It is just so easy to loose every coin I own if not careful. I am not going to try shareware and freeware any more.

I use blockchain wallet so I know I am vulnerable.  :-[

lack of details , no previous posts, instantly leaves thread without answering questions ....

Some of these are posts are likely trolls that are churning up FUD.

Well, it is an offline backup. It's just not a secure cold wallet.

I have.

Just generate a bunch of paper wallets - import when you need to spend.
It's the best way if you have a lot of assets in bitcoin.

If you want us to determine how the coins were stolen, you need to post more information on how you generated your keys, what software was used to generate them?, was the machine on the internet when the keys were generated? Was that machine ever connected back to the internet afterwards? Did you format the machine? Did you use Dropbox or save it somewhere else? Offline storage means generating the bitcoin address offline, then never allowing the machine to ever connect to the internet at any point.

You create signed transactions on the offline machine, then copy the signed transaction data to a computer that is online, then broadcast the tx to the network.

Edit: Clarity

I agree that this is almost certainly fake.

I don't think that he so much used a mixer, but rather probably probably just transferred his coins to another wallet. The transaction in question has a change address address that received ~.00027 BTC and if his coins were really stolen the attacker would probably take all of the coins.

This is the 3rd time i saw a theft related to bitcoins in less than 2 days.
We need someone with terrific skills to track down on what is going on.

That is quite possible as well. but i will assume this guy to be a bad investor. At the same time, he should have gone down to BlockChain and tried to trace the BTC path. To provide evidence for his claims.

Stolen BTC ?
Lost BTC.

No chargeback.

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd187/fire-_god/sparta/Sparta-7.gif

10 BTC is huge money, i don't think he won't research before buy bitcoin
and if they are eariler investor, they will care about safety like you said
so this is a fake thread maybe ::)

A months wages now, we have no idea when he got them.
Early investor may not have cared if it was play money and not investment, as it was to many.

Your wallet.dat file is still sitting on your computer in the roaming app data folder of Bitcoin Core.   That is what everyone is referring to as the wallet still being online...

i can't believe that people who hold bitcoins still don't know about cold storage.. it doesn't take very long to figure out, and it gives you way more peace of mind. every time i see a thread like this, i feel more secure about my holdings.

This is a fake theft.

I had a fake loss of 10,000 bitcoins.  Here is the transaction: a1075db55d416d3ca199f55b6084e2115b9345e16c5cf302fc80e9d5fbf5d48d (https://blockchain.info/tx/a1075db55d416d3ca199f55b6084e2115b9345e16c5cf302fc80e9d5fbf5d48d).

Those were my orphan mother's coins.  Please help me get them back.  Tech support won't help.

10 BTC is over $6,000.00. This is a serious amount of money to most people. Even multibillion dollar companies will investigate and attempt to recover a $6,000 loss.

There are a lot of resources out there to help secure your coins. With that amount I would have them in a paper wallet. If the theft is legitimate I hope they are recovered.

Good link!

It is sad that you lost all your BTC, it reminds me of all the BTC I lost :(
You can build a wallet again

I would have serious doubts that they coins actually were stolen, or even ever belonged to the OP

Now now.
I get what you mean.
He owns 10 BTC and he didn't even store it properly.

Everyone makes mistakes!

Though this is just a BIGGER mistake.

i think its a fake theft, he sent .05 BTC back to himself as change... why wouldnt the hacker take that too, its $30.

Agreed. This is becoming a familiar theme around here. Luckily no one is really falling for it.

Not necessarily.

Knew what they were worth?
Yes.

Knew how to secure them?
Not necessarily.

If I had to guess  would say the OP is trying to get people to give him coins to cover his "theft"

I doubt his theft was real.

I don't think there are a lot of these on here, but the number is growing

Shit man, not fun to lose that many bitcoins.

People think Bitcoin Core is an offline wallet, it's not when your pc is connected to the internet.

Before ever making a cold storage wallet, scan your pc thoroughly, use up2date antivirus, and also scan with Hitman Pro after that.

You should be fine after that to make a cold storage wallet.

Or just use an Linux OS, no need to mess about with any of that nonsense.

PHD Candidate Bitcoin researcher had ~9000 BTC stolen while he was using Linux. CDecker on this forum. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=49

Notice his user number is 49 too. Hell he could even be Satoshi(probably not though).

thank god that we will have companies that store the btc with insurance in the future (yes we need them!) . you cant handle mainstream at this stage. people will store thousands of dollars in their hot wallet (they dont even know what that is actually) or on their tempted, crappy PC. BTC is to complicated for the average joe. far away from mainstream but we will get there  :)

Your meant to keep the machine offline. Looks like he had it online, which is asking for trouble using any OS.

Yeah. It was online. It's still a pretty shocking loss and I don't know of another individual getting hacked while using Linux.

May be you entered some site and some one remote your computer .

Well that is rather easy to hack then, isn't it.
I just ask myself how do they find these individuals holding a decent sum of coins.

Link to post where this loss occurred please! Was he using an encrypted wallet? Were encrypted wallets even available at the time? Using GNU/Linux with an encrypted wallet will drastically reduce by many orders of magnitude  the threat of Bitvoin theft.

My guess is people who are running bitcoin nodes are targeted. A list of current nodes is trivial to obtain. It makes sense that the probability is greater that these machines could contain coins rather than just selecting a machine at random.

This and like Gavin said recently, you should assume your IP is associated your transactions. If this is the case then anyone with a significant amount of coins could be targeted when they broadcast transactions to the network with an address that holds alot of coins.

Luckily it trivial to hide your IP during transmission of a transaction. Simply go here using TOR : https://blockchain.info/pushtx (https://blockchain.info/pushtx) and post the hex of your signed transaction.

That is actually really cool, I did not know you could just paste a signed TX into Blockchain.info. Thank-you for sharing this URL!

Yes. They then just transmit it using their node.

Sorry for your lost. I think it's happened because of malicious software (like trojans). 

The hard drive isn't on a computer.. it's in my safety deposit box in the bank..  I forgot to tell that step.. oops..

omg, I'm very sorry for your 10BTC :'(

No you're not.
Then you are in even greater trouble because you think it's safe

Very cool, but vulnerable for man in the middle attack.

How? What exactly could an attacker do if they gained a signed transaction?  Any bitcoin node broadcasts signed transactions to random strangers.

All you could do is prevent the TX from being transmitted as if you altered the TX in any way then the signature would no longer match, making it invalid.

maybe next better you put your money in bitstamp or anything because a lot people put money there and i think it will more save than you save alone .

sorry to hear this . but patience and i hopes you got the thief !
dont leave keep moving !

This would open up the OP for a whole new set of possible attacks.

IMO the OP should do a better job of securing his computer

You are screwed for sure. Bitcoin is very scary because you can lose it instantly and have no way of getting it back. Never use simple passwords. What I do is type something random and encrypt it into a sha256 string and just use that as a password, written down on a piece of paper on my desk.

Feel sorry for you, and I always reply like this: install Linux, serious operating system. Windows is a toy for housewifes.

It is a good way to have a secure password but you need to secure your piece of paper and a back up to this piece of paper as well and if you travel you need to take it with you if you want to be able to access your coins

Interesting.

I run an electrum wallet on my laptop and keep 10-25 coins on it at all times for daily transactions. 

I'm online all day, and thus my electrum is online too.  I'd be pretty surprised to wake up and find my coins gone.

here's my address: 1DDWEQM11uMUKiqpGEWvBT2at3CjCw3Vra

Hack away!

So I'm guessing this guy probably got a RAT (remote access terminal) installed on his laptop by clicking on a link in an email or downloading an infected wallet client.

This is a very, very bad idea. Humans are notoriously bad at generating randomness. What makes you think that something "random" you type has enough entropy? Of course it depends if you've used digits, uppercase letters, special chars, etc, but even if you've covered all that it's not even close to entropy you get from solid RNG. In both cases, you end down with some non-memorizable string on the piece of paper, so if that's the case - why not use some good source of randomness instead of typing?

My theory: He was running Microsoft Windows.

That address got emptied today, Final Balance   $ 0.00.   :o

There is really very little that can be done with just a public address and a forum username.

The best way to keep your bitcoin safe is probably to make it little known that you own/control a lot of bitcoin. This is better then any security procedure or even the best password.

Have you already find out anything about the scammer?

Wow is the 1DDWEQM11uMUKiqpGEWvBT2at3CjCw3Vra guy trolling or did someone actually hack him. Damn that would be pretty funny, but I'd feel bad for the guy. My tip is to just not have a lot of activity on the internet and never use that address anywhere. If the address is nowhere on the internet, there is almost no chance that someone would stumble upon it randomly, finding the balance of it, and then chances are he won't try to steal it, because he would still need a lot more information. Also if you are very active on the internet, like if your IP address is associated with you, your username on the forum is on many websites, and people know the address is associated with that username, they have a lot larger chances of stealing your BTC.

I do not think creating wallet.dat is safe. I have a tutorial on how to create a true paper wallet. Can someone please help me import here?
here is the link: http://btcguys.us/blog/how-to-create-bitcoin-paper-wallet-tutorial

what the fuck just happened. I thought cold wallets are safe..

They are. This wasn't a cold wallet.

but he mentions he stored offline wallet?

In fact, OP said "My backup wallet is on usb flash in safe place."

And he misunderstood the term "offline wallet".



To OP, the most possible reason IMO is that your machine is still connected to the Internet (hot wallet) and there is malware on your machine.

IMO, the main lesson from all these hacks and thefts is that you should make sure you really store your bitcoin in a safe way (use cold wallet or paper wallet, and make backups).
It maybe a little bit troublesome, but if you have a considerable amount of bitcoin, it definitely deserves the effort to make your bitcoin safe.

The correct way is to install a fresh OS (such as Linux) onto a drive, install Bitcoin armory, backup wallet at multiple places (offline places of course.) Once backed up, coins can be transfered to wallet. Optionally, you can then properly erase the drive leaving only the backups.

*At no point was the machine connected to the internet.*

This is a cold offline wallet.

it is best to used a computer that will never go online and also make sure to have internet security software such as Bit Defender or Kaspersky

so all in all dont use offline wallet if you dont know how to protect it use VM to install anything suspicious and then you must have a computer which is not using for browsing watching porn etc etc if you have a 1998 pc then thats a good one to store your btc but then some good hacker can hack your pc even if its not online so basically there is no safe place on earth to hide your btc so its up to you on how to protect it

That is not true forever21. I believe that OP used a wallet.dat file and it was stored on his PC that was connected to the internet. In addition, it is likely that OP did not encrypt wallet.dat file.

You may check my guide in the first post to the OP in order to learn how to create a paper wallet.

thats why i said that never used a computer which is using for browsing much better to used your old man's pc and dont connect it to the internet its more safe than laptops or some online desktop

Well if that wallet was created offline and held offline all the time and only you had access to your wallet, than i don't understand how somebody could hack your wallet. Are you sure that only you had access to it? Where did you keep your cold wallet?

Don't even use a computer. Use a paper wallet generated offline. That is the safest.

is there any guide to use paper wallet m8 ?

https://www.bitaddress.org/
Turn off your internet as soon as it loads the page, then click generate paper wallet.

pretty good...but not 100% safe.  still theoretically possible for virus to manipulate results.

Safer is to load the Js code onto a true cold machine.

Agreed. I don't know if the site works on a phone, but buying a cheap android phone and generating it off of that would be a good decision as well.

errr its too damn complicated why not just split all the btc into a 4 different address on inline wallet then lock it to your own ip get 2FA and have a password everywhere

its not that complicated to set up cold storage.

I did it with electrum and it was easy.

There's no need to be overlying complicated when making offline cold storage.  There are alternative clients like Electrum and Armory that make this simple and essentially foolproof.  Armory even has a step by step posting of what to do: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152151.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152151.0)

Now if you have 0.1 BTC it may not be worth the hassle, but if it's more than a month's salary and you don't need access to it regularly it makes sense to spend an hour or 2 and learn how to use 1 or 2 wallet alternatives.

The following is a simple and easy step-by-step tutorial for creating an offline Electrum wallet and making a tx with the offline wallet. :)
https://www.electrum.org/tutorials.html#offline-mpk

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113775.0

Wallet was encrypted but any old wallet.dat that isn't encrypted is of course fair game for hackers.

This is the saddest theft of all since this guy has been around forever and 9222 btc or whatever he lost is an insane amount of money.

Sorry to hear that OP, i had 0.01514 stolen last night and im pissed off, i cant imagine loosing 10btc. Hope some good karma or something comes your way.

IMO the OP is probably trolling and/or trying to get people to give him donations for his "loss"

He didn't give his address at the end of the sob story, and so I don't think he is looking for donations.

you should have used a paper wallet...

Honestly, the more I look at OP's profile and how he hasn't visited in days, the more I think he was just lying.

Prolly a scammer  ???

Well clearly it wasn't an offline wallet so you can stop calling it that. I'm guessing the computer already had some sort of virus/keylogger when before you created the wallet on there and made it offline? You should have formatted the computer or wherever your offline wallet was.

hi!

there is something strange! opened my bitcoin wallet and suddenly a transaction was listed. all btc send to an address i have never seen before. (need passphrase!)
closed it and started again. transaction history gone, all addresses gone. like a fresh,new untouched wallet. appdata/roaming shows a new folder for bitcoin, created just a few seconds ago.
the same happened with my zipcoins!!! now i knew that there's something wrong. i was getting really nervous, opened my synccoin wallet, cinnicoin- and hobonickel wallet. they all showed a zero balance, no transaction history, no old addresses.
i wanted to check my other wallets and opened my appdata/roaming folder. i couldn't believe it! now, all entries were gone. only the wallets i opened minutes before to check them had their folders.

maybe they were moved to another directory? searched for *.dat files on m computer, nothing. i was 98% sure, i got robbed. turned to 99% as i noticed, that my hd shows 80gb more free space than before.all blockdata etc. gone! switched to 99,9% when i wanted to change my major payout adresses and all browsers were deinstalled, so no quick reaction was possible. now, i only have this 0,1% of hope.

can anybody help me with this ****ing situation? or just say me, that i got robbed an there's no chance to do anything. going to clean the system as soon as possible, if there's no chance. i don't get that! if this was an attack, how is it possible to "steal" about 80 gb of data in a few seconds?!? i don't have a "phantasy-speed" internet connection. if someone steals your data, why not just the wallet.dat?

PLEASE, anybody an idea to find my data again?
thanks...

maybe virus attack? any chance to get the erased data back? (avira and malwarebyte running non-stop)

Try using the backup of wallet.dat you previously made and let us know what comes up.

Well you may want to check into this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=725205.new#new

Apparently, the Zipcoin wallet had for a while some sort of backdoor trojan or keylogger or something attached to it, and you mentioned Zipcoin, so there.

Sorry to hear your loss, looks like you're f***d

its simple, your just fucked no way to get it back. :'(

Yuck, another malicious altcoin wallet that is built to steal bitcoin. :(
People wanting the download altcoin wallets should really check the source and compile from source themselves.

most people dont have the skills or the time to check source code, let alone fully check it.

Better to just have a "crap machine" where nothing critical is on and you can reinstall the OS frequently.

Maybe Next Time Make a Private Computer !!
and many protect

This is why you should use offline wallet or paper wallet to hold your bitcoin.
You won't lose your precious bitcoin for malware, hacking, phishing links, etc.

It could be the private keys were compromised when you were making the cold wallet.

Its a shame you lost a huge amount..

Theres that scenario and then theres the hackers situation.

I'm so sorry to hear that! The thread is already a month old. How did this play out? Did you manage to get your Bitcoin back or was the thieve able to get away without a problem? It really is a sad thing. I guess malware or keyloggers were responsible for the theft.

This is not too good at all. There is not anything much you can do now that the transaction has taken place and the BTC has been taken out. I would probably read up more on how to store your bitcoins better before attempting again. I am sorry to see you have had a loss.

that's a bummer, with today's difficulty--mining that back is gonna take a very long time. 

So any news about that?

Bitcoin transactions are irreversible, so pretty much nothing to do.

Maybe you got some rogue friend that managed to get to your cold computer.

Or your pendrive is compromissed and you plugued it in some internet computer, the damage was already done.

Or just a plain lie, like people are saying.

I'm so sorry man. I would assume some sort of keylogger, what else could it be?

this is heart breaking. I've never reached that big amount of BTC, and to think it'll just be gone over a hack

The security is very bad, like my friends always lost in her purse for some poor safeguards what my friend sloppy in the data store or at login time, anywhere.

I am so scared about this btc keep in your wallet too much, her sense of eager to sell. but I own to play at home and safe safe because no one is clicking my computer access.

whether it is the act of phishing?

It actually doesn't come back to the mining difficulty, but rather which miners are available and to which margin the big mining facilities are already pushing the whole mining game. If you have access to cheap electricity, you may be fine, but otherwise just forget about it immediately, I guess. Mining isn't profitable doing at home anymore!

Yes there are a few options, the heist could have been avoided with better safe guards

Im sorry for you, thats big loss :/
Read more about computer security

I always store my savings in offline wallets (cold storage) encrypting them with a very long password.
There's no way for an hacker to steal them because they are never been plugged in a connected computer.

+1 on this one. If you ever have any significant amount of BTC you should always use some kind of cold storage. It is just too risky to keep 6k+ on your computer that you have connected to the internet.

You should have used a watch-only wallet that can monitor the activity of the addresses.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_to_set_up_a_secure_offline_savings_wallet

follow this link to prevent yourself from those attack

Yeah at the very least you should have a clean dedicated computer for storing btc that only connects to the internet when you want to send / receive bitcoin. Anything over 1 btc should be stored offline in my opinion.

OP created this thread on July 18, and hasn't logged in since that day.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=352307

Probably he has lost all his confidence in bitcoin, or probably he was just trolling. TBH, I am leaning towards the latter one.

OFC the latter, people always do that smh, they post something that attracts attention then leave.. no update ever.

This will go a long in helping me secure my wallet, advice noted.I'm new too, thanks.

Good link but very basic

Good link but very basic though

The idea is to learn as much as possible and be a bit paranoiac as to what could happen

If your wallet ever gets stolen by anyone it's gone and you won't get it back unless the hacker as a guilt trip.

Exactly. If that means installing a new linux distro on an old computer JUST for the purpose of creating a paper wallet, be it so.

I wonder if people realized that OP basically trolled them.

That is indeed nuts. I would have my wallet offline if wasnt poor.

Why can wallet offline only yes and no access can lose btc also, it's really weird: /

but my friend and he had dozens of btc ofline store in the wallet and in Simpen in flash until now safe

You have to guarantee that you are using a single different password for each account and email if you want to make it into this world.

The security is very bad, like my friends always lost in her purse for some poor safeguards what my friend sloppy in the data store or at login time, anywhere.

sounds bad! bye bye bitcoin sorry to see you go :(