By George Ward
The crypto industry received sad news about 2,000 private crypto keys stolen from Edge Wallet. An attacker exploited a vulnerability in the wallet, which compromised the private keys and allowed access to funds.
Fortunately, the Edge Wallet team quickly responded and patched the vulnerability. This is yet another reminder of the importance of security in the crypto industry as the number of incidents continues to rise in 2023.
With the ever-increasing value of cryptocurrencies, it is more important than ever to take the necessary steps to ensure the security of crypto assets.
Edge Crypto Wallet Provider Suffers Security Breach
On February 22, the company published a post outlining the incident and confirming that they had located the vulnerability. The team has already released a patch to address the problem.
On February 20, a user notified the team of an illicit transaction that resulted in them losing all their BTCs. The attack only targeted BTC, while other assets remained untouched.
This implies that the assailant only had access to the individual master private key for the Bitcoin wallet. Thus, the user’s account was not logged into, but rather the private key of the Bitcoin wallet was breached.
After further probing, the team discovered that a few choices made in the buy and sell tabs could open up a security breach in private keys. Specifically, if a user chooses a few options, it would cause the private key of the selected wallet to be logged on the device’s hard drive.
Another option was if Edge users utilized the upload logs feature and selected particular buy and sell options, the feature would send information to servers with private keys. The impacted keys were only a tiny percentage of those created with Edge, precisely about 0.01%.
The total amount of money stolen is estimated to be a low five-figure sum in US dollars.
Edge Wallet Pauses Controversial ‘Private Mastercard’
Edge Wallet is a non-custodial digital wallet that runs on a decentralized infrastructure. It concentrates on confidentiality and safety, utilizing zero-knowledge proofs in its development.
Meanwhile, controversy has surrounded the project, particularly for its “private Mastercard.” The project announced that the Mastercard would provide high-level privacy, yet it declared that it has yet to gain authorization.
As a result of this disclosure, Edge put the card program on pause. Also, reports have surfaced about the Titan Stealer virus targeting Edge Wallet.
The malware can steal user data, screenshots, FTP client information, and other relevant data.
Crypto Security Breaches Show No Sign of Slowing
Over the past year and a half, attackers have targeted the crypto market. The most popular method of extracting currency at the time was the cross-chain nodes invasion, which was responsible for several of the largest crypto hacks of the year.
Unfortunately, 2023 has already seen its share of losses, even though only two months have passed. Earlier this week, a group of hackers attacked the Platypus platform and stole $8.5M, which led to the debugging of the USP stablecoin.
The hacker got away with $4M in a social engineering attack on Trust Wallet.