That could easily be fixed then. Those are not real spends, just database motions. The coins could be restored easily by repurchasing them. Until he tries to make off with them in USD or whatever.

The problem is that I can't shut the machine as this is my work machine. I doubt any forensic expert can do shit. Bitcoins are 100% non reversible and even if this "expert" were to find out the IP address of the person who got it there is no guarantee that it was his real IP and well I'd be spending more than 25,000 BTC just to chase this.

What I'm going to do though is shut the machine down and let the symantec antivirus clean the supposed infection it detected when I ran a scan of f-secure online scan (for some reason it detected a bunch of virus in the temp dir where the online scanner stores its temporary work - could be false). And then I'm going to backup my important data. Format and reinstall the machine.

Then I'm going to sell whatever bitcoins I have remaining, take it as a life lesson, and count this as a not so fun experimentation with cryptographic currency.

I am then going to focus on making plain old paper dollars and store them in a bank where at least I'll have the full force of society or some central government insurance backing me up - not to mention some recourse to the law in case of any theft.

If those coins indeed wound up on mtgox the thief can be identified as soon as he tries to get the money out of mtgox, no?

I'd be equally suspicious of an inside job (someone in meatspace with physical access to your computer).

If it was a trojan or malware theft, they probably would have already deleted it remotely.

Call your ISP and try to get logs of all of your activity.  Maybe you can trace it to a proxy or C&C server.

If you don't see any suspicious activity in the ISP logs, then start interrogating your friends or friends of friends.  But don't lose them over this.  Some are trustworthy but trust nobody.  Maybe it was a stranger down who found out through the grapevine of your BTC activity, and walked in your dorm room while you were on the pot.

I sympathize with you.


Don't get stuck in the past.  I know its no comparison, but I'm sure any trader is kicking themselves for not selling at $30 and buying back at $10, (triple their holdings).  Many more traders are probably kicking themselves for selling at $10 and buying back at $20 (lost half their holdings).

Move on.  If you were rich once you can get rich again.

Move on.  It is hard to get rich trading.  Start an exchange.  MtGox once again having technical problems.  With the volume of BTC moving, wouldn't take much share of the trading volume to start making $2k per day.  After 10 days of that you'd have it back.

Move on.  If you let this stop you, it will.  Shit happens.  Some people were overnight millionaires because they started mining in 2010.  I knew of bitcoin then.  Why fall into a deep depression for not being an even earlier adopter?  In retrospect, its the same thing as losing coins.

Don't live in retrospect.  Will be very hard to move on.  BTC is still a wonderful opportunity.

The best way to protect against this is to have an encrypted wallet file that you use as a savings account, and rarely access. Leave a smaller amount of coins in your regular wallet and the incentive to attack your computer is lessened.

And the damage is reduced too if it happens.  Good idea.

$20k != $500k

In theory yes. Of course it would protect against stealing the wallet file. Normally you only need the data encrypted for doing transactions which is a very short time window. Especially with savings wallets which get accessed not very often. An encrypted wallet that stays encrypted even while the client is running would do tons in favor of security.
There is a big difference between getting one time access to a machine and having a program running to wait for the wallet to be decrypted in memory for 100ms.

I have a router, the router is secure.

The funds were taken from a WINDOWS machine. God I'm starting to hate windows so much now! I doubt this would've happened had it been a linux machine!

I agree the fact that the wallet is unencrypted is totally ridiculous.