My wallet has been hacked. What to do?

[Sidney986]

Your earlier post states you were virus checking the electrum file rather than using the signatures electrum provides for this purpose.  I suspect that's why you lost the Bitcoin or because you did not use a hardware wallet or sign the transaction on a air gapped computer.

[mrust_mobile]

Cases like this one only shows that legacy banking isn't going away any time soon. Being your own bank is a serious business. It is not a joke.

Can I do anything to return the money?

You can call the police. Nothing else can be done.


Maybe the hacker is very close to you. Does anyone have access to your computer? Do you have a weak login password? Do you have a login password at all? These things happen too. Maybe a friend of yours took a photo of your priv key with his cell phone while you were taking a piss and then he decided to rob you after a few days.

[Pmalek]

I am sure that even if it is confirmed that the attack was successful not due to user error, but using some kind of wallet vulnerability, Electrum does not compensate for the losses to its users, as Nicehash did in a similar situation.

Electrum doesn't run a for-profit business. They don't make money on our use of their software, so there is no pool of funds from where you could get compensated. Their software is free, you don't pay any fees to them for the product you use. It's open-source software where each user is responsible for protecting their sensitive information.

[DireWolfM14]

Cases like this one only shows that legacy banking isn't going away any time soon. Being your own bank is a serious business. It is not a joke.

Unfortunately, this type of situation causes me to agree with you, as much as I don't want to.  But as has been demonstrated by the OP's comments on Github, he expects the development team to compensate him for his loss, as if bitcoin was FDIC insured.  Obviously it's not.

The OP doesn't seem interested in evaluating his own habits and practices to make sure this never happens again.  Doing so would equate to taking responsibility and accountability for the loss, while it's much easier to blame the software or the developers.  I can't say that the OP is unique in this situation, the lack of accountability seems to be a societal plague these days.

[Shaddyr]

Your earlier post states you were virus checking the electrum file rather than using the signatures electrum provides for this purpose.  I suspect that's why you lost the Bitcoin or because you did not use a hardware wallet or sign the transaction on a air gapped computer.

I posted both answers - about antivirus Ok and about GPG Ok. And - yes I don't have a cold wallet otherwice I wouldn't write this topic, right?

Maybe the hacker is very close to you. Does anyone have access to your computer? Do you have a weak login password? Do you have a login password at all? These things happen too. Maybe a friend of yours took a photo of your priv key with his cell phone while you were taking a piss and then he decided to rob you after a few days.

I have to duplicate my answer - none but the cat. To use a password the wallet-file need to be stolen but it wasn't as I already said.
Please be careful - many of the questions have already been asked and answered.

[Cricktor]

the seed file is always located in another archive, also under a password. I never turn to him - there is no need. It has not been available on PC for many years.

When a software wallet like Electrum generates a new wallet, you're shown the wallet recovery words in an environment whoes safety is basically unknown when it is an online computer. You can make this a rather safe environment when you boot from a knowingly safe system, like TAILS or similar OS boot environments which start from a known state. If you keep this offline during the wallet creation and destroy the environment before it can go online, you're likely pretty safe.

The wallet's recovery words have to be written down offline, no exception here unless you like to gamble. Trying to save the recovery words on a digital device that might go online in some future is a recipe for desaster. Yes, yes, you shout, but it's an encrypted archive. Well, good luck with that. How strong is your encryption passphrase? Are you 100% sure (btw, you likely can't be) there's no malware, keylogger, whatever on your device?
Any online storage of your recovery words weakens the security to that of the encryption password. Typing this encryption password on an online device makes it susceptible to password stealers and keyloggers, not to mention danger from ransomware for digital storage schemes.

When you have written down the recovery words offline or stamped them in metal washers/plates, don't take a picture with your mobile device. Think about it!

Now you probably should try to remember when you handled your recovery words on which environments (online? bad!, offline? better, but doesn't help too much, if the device will go online later) and under which circumstances.

It's way easier to make mistakes than to do it all right. Use a hardware wallet in the future as decent ones are usually not affected by malware on a computer as long as you carefully examine the transactions you're going to sign with a hardware wallet.

[Shaddyr]

The OP doesn't seem interested in evaluating his own habits and practices to make sure this never happens again.  Doing so would equate to taking responsibility and accountability for the loss, while it's much easier to blame the software or the developers.  I can't say that the OP is unique in this situation, the lack of accountability seems to be a societal plague these days.

Absolutely not. My first thought was - "where and when did I mess up." I convulsively recalled whether I went where, downloaded what, what incidents happened during this time, how long ago I changed the password, etc. That is why your conclusion about the removal of responsibility is a miss. And I tried to answer all your questions as detailed as possible. That's why there were fewer questions asked - the wrong picture comes out. Especially in the context of the number of affected people.
And - yes, that's right, I'm upset that the money is lost - they have been accumulating for more than one year there, for a minute. And it is precisely on the basis of an analysis of the general situation that I conclude that something more than just my mistake happened and that this software was unable to protect me.

As I wrote above you can work with the wallet profile from another PC by simply entering the correct password. I wanted to clarify - does everyone know that this same file contains your seed phrase as well? Even if you write it on your forehead and put the cap on your very nose, but if this file falls into the wrong hands, the phrase will also be in these hands and the wallet can be restored as many times as the thief wants, no matter how you change the password of the remaining copies of you?

PS: by the way who was that genius who put the game as a captcha? I hardly understood at all what was needed from me and how to achieve this. You would have forced to solve the Newton binomial

[nc50lc]

I wanted to clarify - does everyone know that this same file contains your seed phrase as well? Even if you write it on your forehead and put the cap on your very nose, but if this file falls into the wrong hands, the phrase will also be in these hands and the wallet can be restored as many times as the thief wants, no matter how you change the password of the remaining copies of you?

Yes, it's in the wallet file protected only by your password, if there's no password set, it's in plain text that can even be read by a text editor.
Even if you changed that password or set a password in one copy of the wallet file, the other copies wont be affected by that password change.

That's because the wallet file, password or seed phrase aren't saved in a server but the local machine where the wallet is saved.

PS: by the way who was that genius who put the game as a captcha? I hardly understood at all what was needed from me and how to achieve this. You would have forced to solve the Newton binomial

This year's "April Fools" event wasn't as crazy as the previous IMO.

For reference, here's the admin's reply to the "capcha update" thread: Re: New CAPTCHA now required before posting
Here's the list of previous April Fools threads: [Compilation] All pranks that was made by theymos in every April Fools Day come.