LNbits Tells Operators to Take Servers Offline

LNbits urged all operators to take their servers offline Sunday after a wave of reported attacks, warning that emergency security patches were in preparation for its Lightning wallet platform.

The shutdown message appeared at 8:56 a.m. ET (13:56 UTC) Nov. 8, about 80 minutes after a narrower warning directed users to disable the Paywall extension.

Kevin Ravensberg, operator of Telegram tipping service Bittipbot, said attackers created new accounts on his LNbits instance and withdrew 2,285,545 satoshis (0.02285545 BTC) between 4:22 and 9 a.m. ET (09:22 to 14:00 UTC) Nov. 8.

LNbits runs on top of a Lightning funding source and provides wallet and payment tools. The shutdown message did not identify affected software versions or give a server count or incident-wide loss total.

As of 2:21 p.m. ET Monday, Nov. 9, LNbits' latest listed software release remained version 1.6.2, dated Sept. 18. The notice gave no timing for the patches.