The biggest problem of hardware wallet owners is the problem of security in the narrowest sense of the word: it is a problem of personal security!

It is a simple problem of bandit robbery. As with any other form of value theft, this type of robbery is possible with Bitcoin. And here is, again, Bitcoin in advantage over the only real money from the previous period, precious metals. Someone can steal Bitcoin from you only if they know you own it. All the more dangerous are hacker attacks on hardware wallet databases. The recent attack on the French manufacturer of the very popular hardware wallet Ledger has revealed more than a million email addresses and almost 300,000 physical addresses and phone numbers of buyers of this cryptocurrency wallet. What does that mean?

Problem Description

The most elegant description of the problem is given in the comic on the satirical page xkcd.com , which looks like this:

Како Криптођокица замишља:

— Рачунар му је заштићен шифром. Хајде да је пробијемо.
— Неће ићи. То је РСА од 4096 бита.
— Бљак! Пропаде нам подли план!

First thing first…

In the event of a breach in Ledger’s database, you should first know that the company itself does not have your keys nor has it ever had them. This means that your funds – if you have them and have followed the simple tips from the instructions manual – are safe on the blockchain. But you are no longer safe! All customers in the database are at potential risk of physical attack (eng). And that’s not a pleasant feeling at all, because you may not have cryptocurrency at all, but the attackers don’t know it!

It is interesting that the greatest experts in the field of decentralized cryptocurrencies were by nature of their job buyers of Ledger wallet, so their names and addresses were among the discovered documents. That is why there are no better advisors who will describe the situation to you and suggest how to solve it, than those who are most endangered themselves. If you speak English, be sure to watch this lengthy video in which Andreas M. Antonopoulos brings guests whose data has also been revealed, and in which they suggest how to overcome this situation and how to protect personal data so that the situation does not happen again, how to behave if you get hacking blackmail via your computer… So, Andreas Antonopoulos, Taylor Monahan, founder of MyCrypto Jameson Lop, founder and head of Casa and Peter McCormack, journalist and owner of an internet podcast ‘What Bitcoin did’, are taking part in the conversation:

If you own a Ledger hardware wallet, you can check to see if your information has been compromised on the following pages: intelx.io and haveibeenpwned.com The key tip would be to buy hardware wallets for physical cash at the store, without handing over personal information to anyone. An alternative is to use paper wallets with appropriate security measures. But be sure not to miss listening to the whole conversation.