TUTORIALS Electrum
Burgling Bitcoins
ELECTRUM
Nate Drake invites you to his crypto-heist training school, as he discusses how to steal Bitcoin wallets and crack passwords, just for fun!
OUR EXPERT
Nate Drake is a tech journalist specialising in cybersecurity. He once stored his Bitcoin in a paper wallet, only to find his mother had scrawled her shopping list over the back of it.
During the first quarter of 2025 the estimated losses of crypto hacking were estimated at over $1.6 billion. Around 92% of this was from crypto exchange Bybit. North Korean hacking group Lazarus was able to steal around
$1.5 billion in Ethereum tokens.
It did this by compromising a third-party provider, then tricking the CEO into transferring funds from a cold wallet to one the hackers controlled.
Even if you’re not running a multi-billion dollar exchange, your cryptocurrency could still be at risk if it’s not properly secured.
The best solution for people who take their crypto seriously is to use a hardware wallet like the Trezor Safe 3. As the wallet’s private keys are never exposed to the internet, it’s harder for bad actors to steal them.
If you don’t feel that a hardware wallet is worth the trouble and expense, this guide is for you. Here we’ll create a crypto wallet using Ethereum for testing purposes. We’ll then guide you through some basic steps hackers use to steal your funds.
Set up your wallet
While hacking is always fun, we cannot emphasise strongly enough that you shouldn’t use a real cryptocurrency wallet for this tutorial.