Bitcoin wallet manufacturer BitBox has told users it was able to fix “severe vulnerabilities” with its hardware wallet’s firmware, and reassured users that no funds were taken. Yet it still urged users to upgrade carefully.
Writing in a blog post Tuesday, the Swiss company said that one of the vulnerabilities would have allowed an attacker to manipulate users into installing firmware that could lead a criminal to steal funds.
Users should update firmware through the official BitBoxApp, ideally by clicking the in-app update prompt rather than searching for it, BitBox said.
“There are no reports of stolen user funds and there is no reason for users to panic,” the company said. “We recommend all users to update their BitBox devices to the latest firmware version, which fixes all security issues described in this article.”
It added that another “severe vulnerability” discovered was related to memory corruption. In its post, BitBox said the finding was related to the Multi edition of the BitBox, and could enable arbitrary code execution and the subsequent installation of malicious firmware and potential loss of funds.
BitBox also mentioned that the Bitcoin-only edition of the BitBox was not affected, as its firmware does not contain the affected code.
Bitcoiners are still reeling after users of the popular Coldcard product, designed by Canadian company Coinkite, had their funds drained due to a firmware bug in the devices that lead to a weak seed generation (RNG). Unlike the Coldcard hack, users or BitBox do not need to migrate funds, only update the firmware.
Hackers have since stolen a confirmed $115 million in bitcoin, according to Galaxy Research’s latest figures — but the figure could be much higher.
Canadian company Coinkite first warned users on July 31 that a firmware bug in Coldcard Mk3 devices — starting with version 4.0.1 in March 2021 — caused seed generation to fall back to a weak software Pseudorandom Number Generator instead of the hardware true random number generator, allowing hackers to essentially guess investor seedphrases.
The number has slowly risen as the criminals have targeted more recent devices while Coinkite and other Bitcoiners have urged Coldcard users to immediately move their funds.