Crypto● Neutral
AI Collapses Exploit Window in $89M Coldcard Wallet Hack
Attackers used frontier AI to find a seed-generation flaw in Coldcard wallets, stealing nearly $89 million. Security experts say the theft shows why static reviews are no longer enough.
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Nearly $89 million disappeared from thousands of Bitcoin addresses linked to Coldcard hardware wallets on Thursday, July 30. The attackers did not break Bitcoin's cryptography or penetrate an air-gapped device. Instead, they identified a software defect using frontier artificial intelligence, Coinkite said.
Coinkite, the company behind Coldcard, said the problem originated in a 2021 software migration. Seed generation was routed away from the intended hardware random-number generator and toward a software fallback in a MicroPython component. The cryptographic library itself was sound. The integration was not.
Because the Coldcard source code is public, Coinkite assumes someone used frontier AI to review older firmware and find the issue. The flaw reduced the universe of possible private keys enough to make them searchable offline.