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Digital Currency Ethereum Is Cratering Amid Claims Of a $50 Million Hack (businessinsider.com)

Posted by msmash on from the security-woes dept.

Digital currency Ethereum's value has dropped amid a hack on DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation), an organisation with huge holdings of Ethereum (Wikipedia page). Its value is now below $15, down from more than $21 a few minutes ago. It is believed that as much as $50 million of the digital currency has been stolen. From a blog post on DAO: An attack has been found and exploited in the DAO, and the attacker is currently in the process of draining the ether contained in the DAO into a child DAO. The attack is a recursive calling vulnerability, where an attacker called the "split" function, and then calls the split function recursively inside of the split, thereby collecting ether many times over in a single transaction.From a Quartz report: It's no surprise that cryptocurrency markets are in a panic. Funds invested in the DAO represents more than 10% of all the ether in circulation ($81.8 million worth). A massive hack on the DAO's holdings would be roughly equivalent to a successful heist at a major financial institution.

3 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Would using the Rust prog lang have avoided thi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Good practice makes safe programs. Not programming languages.

    If magic bullet programming techniques were the cure we'd all be running microkernel operating systems programmed in lisp.

  2. Re:Federal Reserve by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Lol. Not even close.

    The "Federal" Reserve is a *private* bank whose purpose is entirely self-serving. They don't insure jack sh*t. Every single Federal Reserve note in circulation is exactly that--a private bank note *borrowed* by the US Treasury then circulated among the population--they are ultimately debt notes that the US owes and pays interest on BTW.

    The *FDIC*, a government entity completely unrelated to the "Federal" Reserve bank, is what insures bank account deposit balances against bank heists and bank collapses.

  3. No it is not. by MartinG · · Score: 3, Informative

    "this is an issue that affects the DAO specifically; Ethereum itself is perfectly safe."

    Source: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016...

    --
    -- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz .@adgimnoprstu