The hacker’s wallet, with over $100,000 worth of USDT, was blacklisted and frozen, while the victim had been drained of almost $170,000 worth of NFTs and other assets.
Seed Phrase News
A seed phrase is a mnemonic code of 12 to 24 words used to recover one’s cryptocurrency wallet. It is also known as a backup phrase, recovery phrase or mnemonic sentence and serves as the cornerstone of most modern crypto wallets and the crypto sphere at large. Therefore, it is crucial that the seed phrase be chosen at random to prevent guessing or reverse engineering. Compared with seed phrases containing fewer words, those with more words have more entropy/randomness.
Entropy generation is the first step in the process of creating a seed phrase. The checksum is then produced by passing the entropy through a hashing function — notably, SHA256. After that, a portion of the checksum is added to the random data. The output is then split into 11-bit chunks, each corresponding to a single word on the BIP39 word list.
With a few rare exceptions, most current wallets will generate a seed phrase upon the creation of a wallet. Unfortunately, there aren’t many ways to customize the seed phrase’s settings, as the process is often automatic. However, users can use a calculator or dice to generate a seed phrase offline.
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- Interview
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Entero Positivo argued typical seed phrase storage methods are too obvious, so he devised a way to hide a crypto wallet in plain sight.
4639 - Follow up
Ledger’s “Recover” service may be concerning, but some crypto industry participants think the feature may onboard new users while helping crypto natives.
10416 - News
Ledger Recover is an over-the-air firmware update allowing users to back up their seed phrases by third-party entities if they opt-in to the new service.
18470 - Opinion
Ledger’s decision to introduce a third party to your wallet seed phrase could appeal to both governments and hackers.
6709 - Opinion
Ledger’s latest update, aimed at making private seed phrases on its wallets recoverable, was simply an attempt to innovate and improve user security.
3532 - News
Developers say third-party apps can’t access Ledger users’ keys without the device owner’s consent.
8344 - News
If the words of a 12-word seed phrase are known, it’s deceptively easy to enter the wallet and sweep the funds.
21333 - Video
James Check, the Lead on-chain analyst at Glassnode, explains why self-custodying your private keys has become more important than ever and how to do it in a few simple steps.
2998 - News
A viral video making rounds on Twitter showed two police officers searching a suspect’s car and coming across pieces of paper, one of which contained seed phrases.
56076 - How to
A wireless device called a hotspot, or helium miner, uses radio technologies for HNT minting and rewards HNT tokens for providing coverage.
28639 - Explained
It’s crucial to remember your seed phrase, which is a string of random words produced by your cryptocurrency wallet when you initially set it up.
- News
Redditor Andre highlighted the ease with which hackers can use the text prediction feature to drain a user’s funds just by being able to type the first word out of the BIP 39 list.
30726 - News
When these cybercriminals obtain the seed phrase, they gain complete control over the STEPN user's dashboard.
7041 - News
The firm warned that If an Apple user has enabled automatic iCloud backups of their MetaMask wallet data, their seed phrase is being stored online.
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