In February, former Canonical developer Alan Pope blogged about the fact that one user had lost nine bitcoins (currently worth around £500,000) due to a fake version of the Exodus wallet they’d installed via the Ubuntu Snap Store.
The Snap was malware masquerading as a legitimate crypto wallet in order to persuade users to hand over their private ‘seed’.
The app in question was removed a few days later and Ubuntu CEO Mark Shuttleworth issued a statement, saying: “Our goal should be that anybody using Snaps from the official Snap Store on any distro should be safer than if they were getting that software from other hosting platforms.” He went on to admit the scope of the problem, whereby cybercriminals were using social engineering to impersonate popular developers, but stopped short of an allout ban on crypto apps in the Snap Store.