The Bitcoin (BTC) wallet is a commonly targeted threat vector in the Bitcoin market, said Mark Vankempen, senior advanced R&D engineer at LogRhythm, adding:
A BTC wallet is like a real wallet filled with cash. You should never keep all your eggs in one basket and the BTC wallet is no different from this age old idiom. So far there is no air tight solution to keeping your BTC safe and secured.
According to Vankempen, one of the most notable BTC losses is the Bitomat.pl Loss. During a routine maintenance restart, the server that hosted their Bitcoin wallet was unknowingly configured to be irretrievable upon shutdown. This resulted in the loss of 17,000 BTC (about 14.5 Million USD at today’s value). This unfortunate disaster could have been easily prevented. He added:
I’ve put together the following action items that can help protect your BTC investment: Backup and encrypt your wallet, make multiple copies of your backup, store them in more than one secure location and finally, don’t keep all your BTCs in one wallet.