Warning: This new Bitcoin Lightning bug allows attackers to steal your BTC remotely

A bug in the Bitcoin Lightning network is allowing attackers to steal BTC remotely from affected lightning nodes.

A Bitcoin developer raised an alarm on the bug on 19 February, saying it affected those using LND older than 0.18.5 and or LITD older than 0.14.1, giving attackers access to drain their lightning nodes.

🚨 LND exploit in the wild 🚨

If you are running LND older than 0.18.5 and/or LITD older than 0.14.1, upgrade immediately. Apparently, affected Lightning nodes can be completely drained by attackers.

— calle (@callebtc) February 19, 2025

How to be safe

To stay safe from the bug, users of the affected versions of lightning nodes are to upgrade their nodes immediately.

The dev also advised that users stay away from using LITD for now if they don’t have to. There’s no official statement confirming the “extremely scary” hack which affected some users, latest information from one of the Lightning Labs developers says the issue may not be the way it was thought.

Based on the information we've been provided with so far, it appears that this was an instance of the user's machine being compromised, leading to `lncli` commands directly executed on the root user (all channels abandoned)

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This does not appear to be an lnd specific issue https://t.co/u3iiMvm3Cn

— Olaoluwa Osuntokun (@roasbeef) February 19, 2025

Lightning network is Bitcoin’s Layer 2 network that was meant to facilitate faster transactions and reduce fees.

It does so by carrying out transactions off the main Bitcoin chain so that there’s no congestion and so the transactions are faster and fees are lower.

The network was created as a solution after Bitcoin started becoming congested and transactions became slower with exorbitant fees.

Although the network has had issues such as technical glitches, this is the first time it has been compromised by hackers to steal BTC.