This may be the main thing to fix here, as it's very plausible that hacks happen again and again... by design.
Today it's an infected printer, tomorrow it will be a game on Steam.
It’s not, because that wasn’t the problem and would not have worked. For one, nothing indicates the $100K were extracted in one go, it looks like it was cumulative. For another, this malware isn’t directly sending coins, it’s just replacing addresses in your clipboard.
"You're sending $100k to L33tHaX0R, are you sure?"
But that would require the protocol to also have the ability to set friendly names against public addresses.
You could imagine a wallet that uses certificates for address validation. So a certificate owner could sign that they own a given public key. ( And sign with the public key to show they own that key too. )
Then that could go into a "verified recipients" section of the wallet, and you could set your wallet to only allow sending to verified recipients. ( Or only allow transactions over X to verified ).
Most crypto exchanges and merchants generate unique addresses per user/transaction, so this won't work. Moreover having a fixed address is bad for privacy because it makes it obvious what the recipient of a given transaction is.
Security isn't an absolute. You're not trying to stop all vectors, you're just trying to put up a barrier to trip up by far the most common and easy method.
In a world where everyone leaves their doors open all day, you're asking "Why shut and lock your door when an attacker could just smash your windows?"
Which it doesn’t, and changing it to do so is not a realistic option. If we’re dreaming up anything, then my suggestion would instead be for no one to be dishonest, or for everyone’s basic needs to be met so they don’t need money and to speculate on cryptocurrencies. I’m pretty confident either of those would happen before every way people routinely get swindled off their cryptocurrencies is solved.
Clipboard attacks are far easier, as most modern systems treat clipboard as a non-critical resource. Which is mind blowing if you ask me.
An app reading from clipboard must ring all sorts of alarms. Let alone writing to it.
You realize any sort of content editing app is going to be reading from clipboard? Most apps used on a daily basis are going to be reading from clipboard.
- An app running in the background listening to clipboard changes;
- An app without a focused/visible window reading clipboard;
- An app reading from clipboard without a corresponding user input (menu/hotkey)
All these should be detectable and controlled by the OS
But something like that would only be surprising if it was more than an obvious lazy asset flip.
The bigger question is, when they said:
> G Data's research showed that the Bitcoin address linked to SnipVex had received about 9.3 BTC, roughly $100,000
How big was the largest amount stolen?
It could be a few individuals with a lot of money in their unprotected software wallets, or it could be a lot of people with relatively smaller amounts stolen from each of them.
If you only have a couple hundred dollars worth of bitcoin and don’t intend to buy any more of it then it doesn’t make much sense to spend as much on a hardware wallet as those cost. But if you have like $500 of bitcoin then it starts to make more sense. Especially if you plan on buying more of it. And if you have over a $1,000 and are still using a software wallet you should really look into getting a hardware wallet ASAP IMHO.
They already do? Here's a random screenshot I found:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/4597798/33999728-3...
the details are blacked out, but you can make out that it shows the address label along with the full addresse