A Bitcoin Core developer has tweeted that he believes his email was hacked and an attacker subsequently deleted his 200 BTC.
Luke Dashjr Suffers A Huge Loss
The developer, Luke Dashjr, is also a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) author, who says he has lost around $1 million in total due to the hack.
Luke Dashjr claims that the hacker had control over his email account for some time before deleting all emails within it after stealing coins worth around 200 BTC ($1.5 million).
I hope that this incident will serve as a wake-up call to the Bitcoin community. You can’t rely on paper wallets to store your coins. If you want to keep your funds safe, they need to be stored in a secure wallet like Electrum or Trezor which are not only backed up online but also allow you control over your private keys.
Wladimir van der Laan is a Bitcoin Core developer and the project’s lead maintainer. He recently claimed on Twitter that he has lost 200 BTC in a recent hack, according to a report by CoinDesk.
Van der Laan explained how the attacker broke into his email and Github account by compromising his phone account: “Someone compromised my email and github account, please reset your 2FA.”
The developer went on to explain that the hacker used these two accounts to access his Facebook profile, from which they were able to gain access to other accounts that use Google’s aggregation feature for user management (such as Instagram).
In a post on Reddit, van der Laan linked to an article outlining how an attacker gained access to his email and Github accounts by compromising his phone account.
The hacker then sent out emails requesting payment in bitcoin from various companies, including Bitmain and ShapeShift, who both confirmed that they received such requests from the hacker’s account.
