Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: BillHampton on July 13, 2011, 09:46 am
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About a month ago I posted on here that my hard drive had failed taking about 500 dollars worth of bitcoins upon it's demise (failed to back my shit up, I'm aware now of what a disastrous mistake that was). I also mentioned a suspicion that my hard drive had an unnatural demise. It died on the day 500,000 bitcoins were stolen from that account via a worm and it was rumored many other accounts had gotten ganked also. About a couple of days before dying, my bitcoin program would die with an error message rather than load and I was unable to access my funds. I could pull up the exact error if anyone is interested.
So for the last month, I've been trying everything I can to recover the drive. Today, I got it resurrected in a very crippled form (chkdsk runs for like an hour and most files on that drive are now broken), unfortunately still can't get the computer to recognize it enough to transfer anything off the broken drive.
I have since gotten a new drive with a fresh copy of windows on it that runs flawlessly. Bitcoin runs flawlessly.
That is UNTIL today.
AS I was fiddling with my broken drive and trying to get my long lost coins back something horrible but interesting began to happen. Bitcoin has stopped working on my fresh drive too, with the EXACT SAME error message that my previous installation gave me in the last couple of days prior to that hard drive's fishy demise. Luckily, I haven't added any funds to my new drives bitcoin program, so I have nothing to lose this time.
Now even if I delete and install a new fresh copy, bitcoin still WON'T run. It dies with the same old error message I was experiencing a couple of days before the failure of my last drive. It would appear by hooking my old broken drive with bitcoin AIDS to my new fresh HD, the bitcoin AIDS has wormed it's way across my other drives too.
I can't guarantee that I got the bitcoin worm (though at this point it is widely known about on the bitcoin forums) but it certainly would be about the only thing that explains this scenario. I have a suspicion if I ever get my old drive working well enough again to get at my wallet file that it would be empty..... but I've still had no luck fixing it.
Sucks that I don't really have a means of purchasing ANYTHING anymore, with bitcoin crashing (even if I install fresh) every time.... The bitcoin AIDS is nasty and I'm not really sure how I got it or how to get rid of it....
If anyone has any input or suggestions they would be appreciated.
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If anyone knows of a virusware program that can truly detect and removed the bitcoin worm, I would appreciate it, as my drive (even the one with the new copy of windows) are showing all the signs of having it....
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Never keep a bitcoin wallet on an online windows PC. If you have to keep it online at least setup a linux VM for it and keep it there. Then the worm will never be able to touch it. It could just be a bug in bitcoin though try googling the error if you haven't already.