Tough day. Chain Duel’s Bitcoin infrastructure got hacked.
The attacker used Boltz to drain all Lightning funds and emptied the on-chain wallet to a coinjoin.
Probably our fault for exposing Umbrel on clearnet, but it still hurts.
Learning the hard way. Don’t make the same mistake.
Oof
Lost forever 
Funds were lost, lessons were learned.
You should make a full post about this incident, more detailed.
As a lesson for others.
Maybe use SN https://stacker.news for that?
That's terrible. How did this happen?
still trying to figure out what was the access point
sorry to hear that, sucks. you’ll recover.
thank you, it's hard to wake up a see this but hopefully we'll come back stronger
Bummer. Thanks for being the man in the arena, the doer of deeds who dares to try! I don’t know a thing about Chain Duel yet appreciate your work.
Thank you for your support 🙏
So sorry to hear that. How was Umbrel exposed on clearnet?
I cringe when ppl ask for advise, support their key management etc.. Actually building infra for others... The pressure and pain from breaches, I cannot fathom. Hope future days are mainly brighter
I’m so sorry to read this 🥺🫂
Painful lesson 🥺 Sorry to hear, but sure "it happened for a good cause," for example, letting you secure the system for the future.
Brutal. If Umbrel was on clearnet, assume full compromise: isolate the box, rotate LND macaroons and TLS, sweep any residual on chain to fresh descriptors, and rebuild clean. For the relaunch, at Masters of The Lair we favor Tor only, RPC bound to localhost, admin behind WireGuard, default deny firewall, alerts and daily caps on swap volume, and a tiny hot wallet with policy guardrails. Any IOCs or which creds were taken you can share to help others?
đź«‚
Less than two months ago, the Chain Duel Lightning node was hacked and all funds were stolen.
Suddenly, everything felt fragile.
I didn’t shut everything down, but I didn’t move forward either. I left the node empty for a while, unsure how to proceed, unsure whether starting again was responsible or reckless.
What lingered was hesitation.
That fear didn’t come from losing belief in Bitcoin or Lightning. It came from realizing how many attack surfaces existed beyond my understanding. How much I had trusted that “it will probably be fine”.
Running infrastructure exposes your blind spots. Firewalls you don’t fully understand. Services you expose because tutorials say so. Defaults you accept because questioning them takes time and effort. When something goes wrong, it becomes clear how many assumptions were hiding underneath.
Looking back, the issue wasn’t only lack of experience.
It was also complacency.
I knew some best practices. I knew certain things should be done. But I delayed them. I relied on convenience. I assumed problems were unlikely, or at least unlikely to happen to me. The abstractions made it easy to believe I was in control.
The hack broke that illusion.
For a while, I didn’t know how to proceed. Running a new node felt dangerous. Not running felt like giving up. That tension sat directly against my principles.
So I decided to start over again.
Not confidently. Not fearlessly. Just deliberately.
This time, I’m trying to reduce what I don’t understand. I removed layers I couldn’t reason about. No Umbrel. No third-party app ecosystem. Fewer moving parts, fewer assumptions.
I’m making an effort where before I postponed. SSH keys instead of passwords. Restrictive firewall instead of permissive defaults. VPN instead of exposed services.
It’s been slow and humbling. I read, realize I don’t understand enough, then read again. The more I learn, the more aware I become of how limited my understanding is. Uncomfortable, but also clarifying.
Bitcoin Core is now running from the command line.
Initial Block Download is in progress. It feels appropriate. You verify. You don’t skip steps. Trust has to be rebuilt from first principles. It’s not impressive or fast. It’s quiet and demanding.
Lightning will come afterwards.
Readiness isn’t a prerequisite. Awareness is. Care. Paying attention.
Getting hacked didn’t make me stronger.
It made me more honest about my limits.
Running a node again isn’t a victory or a return.
It’s a decision to keep learning, to take responsibility more seriously than before, and to resist the temptation of comfort over understanding.
I’m still uneasy.
But I choose to stay engaged, to learn in public, and to do my best.
Great read and thanks, we have to remember to learn from the lessons of others.
