AI-Crafted Exploit Steals Millions from Secure Bitcoin Wallets

The recent Coldcard wallet hack has left thousands of Bitcoin investors reeling after nearly $89 million disappeared from their addresses. The exploit did not require breaking Bitcoin's underlying cryptography or remotely penetrating an air-gapped device, but rather identified and exploited a software defect using artificial intelligence.

According to Coinkite, the company behind the Coldcard wallet, the flaw originated in a 2021 software migration. During this integration, seed generation was routed away from the intended hardware random-number generator and toward a software fallback contained in a MicroPython component.

The issue lies in the fact that static security reviews are no longer sufficient to protect against such attacks. Code that passed an audit three years ago may need to be continually reexamined as models become better at understanding complex systems.