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

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.

Comments

Re:Would using the Rust prog lang have avoided thi

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

No it is not.

[MartinG]

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

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