Whitehats move 52 bitcoin from the Coldcard hack to a recovery trust

“Whitehat operators” have moved 52.37 BTC to an address linked to a newly formed recovery trust, as part of the ongoing fallout from July's Coldcard hardware wallet exploit, according to Galaxy Digital's Head of Research Alex Thorn.

The Coldcard crypto hardware wallet hack began on July 30, with multiple batches (waves 1, 2, and 3) of attacks in subsequent days resulting in estimated losses of over $100 million in bitcoin .

Attackers exploited this, causing wallets to generate seeds using a weaker software-based random number source instead of the wallet’s dedicated random number generator. That made some seeds vulnerable to reconstruction by hackers.

Coinkite, the maker of Coldcard, has since patched the firmware, though funds already exposed under the old seeds remain at risk regardless of the patch.

According to Thorn, some of the coins moved out of victim wallets weren't taken by malicious actors but by whitehats, or ethical cybersecurity professionals who use hacking skills to find and fix security weaknesses.

These so-called good guys swept the funds specifically to keep them safe until they could be returned.