Website Dares Hackers to Steal Bitcoin as the Clock Keeps Ticking

A $2,000 Bitcoin Heist Nobody Can Pull Off

Welcome to Steal My Bitcoin, wherever cybersecurity’s accustomed rules person been turned upside down. Instead of keeping hackers out, the website invites them inside, offers a bitcoin bounty and dares them to instrumentality it. The ngo sounds ridiculously simple: Exploit a deliberately susceptible PHP installation, retrieve a hidden Bitcoin backstage cardinal and bare the wallet. First palmy hacker takes the money.

The website stealmybitcoin.com astatine 11 a.m. EST connected Oct. 25, 2026.

The prize started astir $500 earlier donations pushed it toward $2,000, astir 0.025 BTC. As of precocious Oct. 25, 2026, the wallet reportedly remained untouched aft much than 17 hours online. There are rules, however. Participants indispensable restrict their attacks to the web exertion and PHP container. Attacking the underlying host, sabotaging infrastructure oregon overwhelming the server is forbidden. All enactment is logged.

Two Critical PHP Flaws Meet an Unexpected Roadblock

The situation advertises PHP 8.4.26, a mentation vulnerable to 2 captious information flaws collectively dubbed PHP2Shell. Both transportation severity scores of 9.2, and exigency patches arrived Oct. 21.

The vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, impact memory-management failures that tin perchance licence distant codification execution. In definite configurations, attackers could execute commands without authentication. But here’s wherever the communicative takes a peculiar turn.

One idiosyncratic who examined the situation publicly questioned whether its configuration really exposes an exploitable onslaught surface. The idiosyncratic identified nginx and PHP 8.4.26 done HTTP effect headers, independently confirmed a PHP 8.2-or-newer fingerprint and compared the server’s behaviour against section trial environments.

After initially considering nginx paired with PHP-FPM oregon Apache, the investigation pointed toward thing unexpected: The closest behavioral lucifer appeared to beryllium nginx forwarding requests to PHP’s built-in command-line web server.

Is the Bitcoin Bounty an Impossible Challenge?

The investigation raised an adjacent much provocative anticipation concerning the website’s introduction point. Its responses appeared accordant with PHP’s built-in server delivering a static index.html record alternatively than executing an index.php script. If that mentation is accurate, the advertised vulnerabilities mightiness not beryllium reachable done the challenge’s permitted onslaught surface.

That would fundamentally alteration the competition. Hackers wouldn’t needfully beryllium failing to exploit 2 captious bugs. They mightiness beryllium attacking an situation wherever the required conditions ne'er materialize. The idiosyncratic down the introspection questioned whether the situation was operating successful bully religion but acknowledged the findings could beryllium mistaken and welcomed corrections.

Importantly, effect fingerprinting unsocial cannot found the server’s implicit architecture oregon beryllium exploitation impossible. Still, the proposal remains unverified. Meanwhile, the underlying PHP vulnerabilities are real, and administrators moving affected versions inactive request to patch their systems.

For now, Steal My Bitcoin presents an progressively funny spectacle: A publically advertised bitcoin bounty, a assemblage of would-be hackers and a increasing suspicion that the integer vault mightiness not person an accessible doorway successful the archetypal place.