Guarda Wallet review

Guarda is a competent multi-chain wallet with an unusually honest incident report, and that report points straight at the thing to be careful about. On December 30, 2020, an attacker took over Guarda's account at its domain registrar, GoDaddy, repointed the DNS for guarda.co and guarda.com, and put up a page "designed exactly like our homepage" whose only feature was a backup upload form. Users of the desktop, web and Chrome extension versions who uploaded a backup handed over their addresses and private keys. Mobile app users saw only transaction delays, because the mobile app's resources sat on subdomains the attacker had not repointed.

Guarda's CEO published the timeline himself, with the registrar's own logs attached: two factor authentication removed at 11:55 with no login event recorded before it, then the email address, phone number and PIN all changed. Guarda notified users on social media within minutes, sent documents to GoDaddy inside half an hour, filed statements with the Estonian Cyber Police and Financial Police, and says its engineers kept the phishing page erroring for around 90% of the window before it recovered the account that evening. It pointed at KrebsOnSecurity's reporting on GoDaddy staff being used in attacks on cryptocurrency services as the likely explanation.

Note what was not breached: nothing of Guarda's own. The lesson is structural, and it survives the incident. A wallet whose flow includes "upload your encrypted backup to our website" is one DNS record away from a convincing fake, and no amount of local encryption helps when you hand the file over yourself. If you use Guarda, use the desktop or mobile app, and never enter or upload a backup on a web page, whatever the address bar says.

The product today is broad. Guarda has been operating since 2017 and claims on its own site more than 70 blockchains, over a million supported tokens and over a million active users. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, on iOS and Android, as a web app and as a Chrome extension. It buys with cards and Apple Pay, stakes on 14 networks, supports multisig, lends against holdings, and now carries third party perpetual futures and prediction markets inside the wallet. Bitcoin is supported, but this is a wallet for people who hold a lot of different things.