Digital currency never seemed more vulnerable after reports surfaced that there is a new software that allows hackers to steal Bitcoin from your brain. Brainflayer is the name of the technology that will be featured at the DefCon hacker conference.

“For bitcoin fans, the notion of a ‘brain wallet’ has long seemed like the ideal method of storing your cryptocurrency: By simply remembering a complex passphrase, the trick allows anyone to essentially hold millions of dollars worth of digital cash in their brain alone, with no need to keep any records on a computer,” said Andy Greenberg of Wired. 

The software is designed to hack into brain wallets and siphon out the digital assets. Ryan Castellucci will be displaying the new software in hopes to end the act of using brain wallets as storage for the currency, according to the report.

“People still want to use brain wallets because they like the idea of a key stored in your head…They’re in denial about how bad the situation is, and some of them are going to get screwed,” said Castellucci, a researcher for the security firm White Ops, according to Wired.

“Please move your bitcoins to somewhere where they won’t get cracked. I want to undeniably prove to everyone that this is not safe.”

Brain wallets use a passphrase which is turned into a string of numbers that are used as the private key to all of your bitcoins. The passphrase is the part that the user remembers and it replaces the need to have to memorize the long string of numbers in the private key.

“The problem, says Castellucci, is that humans don’t choose strong, random passphrases as well as they think they do,” according to the article.

“And any hacker can patiently guess millions upon millions of passphrases, converting them into private keys and trying them on every bitcoin address on the blockchain, the public ledger of all bitcoin locations. Even when a bitcoin user thinks she has chosen a sufficiently strong passphrase for her brain wallet, Castellucci says it often can’t stand up to the cracking resources of thieves motivated by an instant cash reward.”

Whether or not this will divert users away from using brain wallets is still up in the air, however, the conference might yield some pretty big opinions on the Brainflayer.

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