It is painful to lose something that you do not want to lose, let alone if the value of this thing is 16 million dollars.

Yesterday, a Bitcoin investor who downloaded an old version of the popular “Electrum” cryptocurrency wallet lost and updated the wallet in response to a fake update message, which appeared on the wallet containing 1,400 bitcoins, worth about $16 million at current prices.

Bitcoin loss due to a simple error:

A bitcoin investor announced that he lost 1,400 bitcoins in a wallet he said he had not been able to access since 2017.

Coinciding with the incident, there were hackers targeting users of the popular Electrum cryptocurrency wallet.

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This investor told that he had downloaded an old version of the Electrum wallet – and here is the simple and expensive error at the same time, as the latest official versions should always be downloaded because it comes with important security updates – and that he wanted to transfer about 1 Bitcoin after completing the wallet setup, but he was unable to continue the transaction due to The message that appeared in the popup.

The message stated that the wallet must be updated for security before transferring funds, but this was a trap.

All the bitcoins of the responding investor were transferred by updating the wallet, which was designed to transfer bitcoins to the hacker’s address.

Ben Kaufman, a software engineer, talked about how Bitcoin works on the Electrum wallet and how hackers hacked it.

According For Kaufman, the Electrum wallet can connect to the blockchain digitally via a server selected from the public list of Electrum servers.

Anyone can run such a server and some users can connect to it randomly.

When a transaction is broadcast in Electrum, it is sent to the connected Electrum server to propagate across the blockchain.

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The server should try to add the process to its memory pool and propagate it to other bitcoin nodes.

If the operation is invalid, the Electrum server to which the user is connected may display an error message with a window stating this to the client.

Versions of Electrum prior to version 3.3.3 allowed the error message to be a controllable text, meaning that the Electrum server could return any message it wanted and make it appear as an error message to the user.

This is where the fraud occurred.

Therefore, we advise in Arab Bitcoin to use strong, famous and well-secured digital wallets, download them from their sources, and make sure to update them regularly.

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