Do thefts from wallets.dat happen often?

[soy]

I see the rare thefts from major exchanges.  I can see someone running bitcoin-qt or bitcoind as well as having an account on an exchange and after buying some BTC shooting them over to his wallet on the home computer running Bitcoin.  With or without the wallet.dat having been encrypted, how often does a theft from a home system wallet.dat happen? It's not like those would make the news much.

soy

[BTC Books]

There have been wallet-stealing trojans in the wild.

But if you encrypt your wallet, even if it's stolen it can't be drained of bitcoin.

One assumes you keep backups off your computer...

[Gator-hex]

But if you encrypt your wallet, even if it's stolen it can't be drained of bitcoin.

Lies.  

They can record you key presses so they know your password before they steal it.

I would keep your wallet on a machine or linux partition not used for anything else.

I suspect people get hacked by their mining software or pirate software.

Even the official client has an IRC (alt network) so keep IRC ports firmly blocked in your firewall!

Where money is concerned trust nobody!

[BTC Books]

They...?

Lies...?

Trust nobody...?

Tough life...  but I suppose you have enough bitcoin to be concerned about the uber-hacker.

Now me - I have my wallet on one machine, my blockchain on another, and bitcoin-qt on a third, with a bitcoin.conf file that keeps it all straight.  When I enter the password I don't touch the keyboard.  Instead, I feed four different secret formulas to four different cows; I wait for them to fart; I shine four laser beams through the fart-clouds and capture the different radii of gyration to a detector that outputs my password in angular notation into my computer through the serial port.

But I'm the careful sort.

Sheesh...

[Gator-hex]

"A Bitcoin user has lost 25,000 Bitcoins ... the stolen wallet was encrypted on the HDD and backed up regularly".

http://www.geekosystem.com/first-major-bitcoin-theft/

 

[BTC Books]

Yes.  I remember that well.  It's not quite what I suspect you're thinking.  You might want to go back and read the threads - very interesting stuff.