'Unhackable' Bitfi crypto-currency wallet maker will be shocked to find fingernails exist
A crypto-currency wallet heavily promoted as "unhackable" – complete with endorsements from the security industry's loopy old uncle John McAfee and a $350,000 bounty challenge – has, inevitably, been hacked within a week.
The $120 Wi-Fi-connected Bitfi wallet is a hardware device that stores your crypto-coins and assets, and requires a passphrase to access these goodies. The phrase is used to temporarily generate, for a few milliseconds, the private key needed to unlock the data, and is then discarded. So without the passphrase, you can't get at the gizmo's fun bux, allegedly.
It was thus launched last week with some bold claims: it was the "most sophisticated instrument in the world" offering "fortress-like security" for your electronic coins. Its phone-like device is "the world’s first unhackable device", the manufacturer announced – to some mockery by security experts.