Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Merits 7 from 4 users
Re: Why has my newly created Bitcoin address already been used?
by
bob123
on 11/05/2020, 18:43:30 UTC
⭐ Merited by LoyceV (4) ,Heisenberg_Hunter (1) ,o_e_l_e_o (1) ,morvillz7z (1)
Even if I have the most malicious software wallet in existence on my airgapped computer, there is nothing it can do to steal my coins.

Technically, this isn't completely true  Tongue

There are quite a few paper about how to exfiltrate data from air-gapped computers.
Those techniques are highly sophisticated and the chances of happening to are close to zero. But some would include:

  • AirHopper: Malware to encode data into FM signals transmitted from a screen cable. This signal can be received by any smartphone with an FM receiver
  • PowerHammer: Exfiltration via Powerline: With probes on the computer and the power control box, malware on the air-gapped computer can increase/decrease the cpu load by doing useless (but ressource heavy) calculations to transmit data via the power line.
  • Another option requires a camers to be installed close to the computer: Using the hard disk led's to transmit data.

Those are not just theories, but they have been proven to work.
There are a few more extremely fascinating (and highly unlikely) attacks which could extract data from such an air-gapped setup.
Quite a few paper have been published which cover exactly that: Exfiltrating data from air-gapped computers. They are quite exciting to read.

It is obvious that no typical crypto holder will face such an attack, altough its interesting to know which techniques exist  Smiley