Hardware Wallet Flaw Leads to $38M Bitcoin Theft in 25 Minutes
A critical flaw in hardware wallet seed generation allowed attackers to drain 594 BTC in less than half an hour.
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Key takeaways
- A randomness flaw in hardware wallet seed generation resulted in the loss of 594 BTC.
- Attackers swept roughly $38 million worth of Bitcoin in a single 25-minute window.
- The bug made theoretically unguessable seed phrases predictable enough to brute-force.
594 BTC. Gone in 25 minutes. A fatal randomness bug inside a hardware wallet turned supposedly unguessable seed phrases into sitting ducks, letting attackers snatch the entire stash before anyone could react.
That Bitcoin was worth roughly $38 million when the swift sweep went down. Hardware wallets rely on pure randomness—entropy—to build recovery seeds no human or computer can guess. Break that entropy and the math guarding your money collapses. The pool of possible keys shrinks fast, making private keys easy to calculate and drain.
A 25-Minute Blitz
Nobody moves that fast manually—automated scripts ran this show. Attackers clearly spotted the flaw in the seed generation code, mapped out the weak key pairs, and sat on the blockchain like hawks. Once triggered, their routines wiped out the affected wallets before users even realized they had a problem.
Why it matters
Hardware wallets get sold as the ultimate fortress for crypto. But cold storage is only as tough as the math behind it. If a device uses bad randomness to generate your private keys, keeping them offline gives you zero real protection. If you're on an affected setup, move your funds to a new wallet built on verified entropy immediately.
Source: CoinDesk
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