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$31 Million In Tokens Stolen From Dollar-Pegged Cryptocurrency Tether

Posted by BeauHD on from the malicious-activity dept.

Mark Wilson shares a report from BetaNews: All eyes may be on the meteoric rise of Bitcoin at the moment, but it's far from being the only cryptocurrency on the block. Startup Tether issued a critical announcement after it was discovered that "malicious action by an external attacker" had led to the theft of nearly $31 million worth of tokens. Tether is a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency formerly known as Realcoin, and it says that $30,950,010 was stolen from a treasury wallet. The company says it is doing what it can to ensure exchanges do not process these tokens, including temporarily suspending its backend wallet service. Tether knows the address used by the attacker to make the theft, but is not aware of either who the attacker is, or how the attack took place. The company is releasing a new version of its Omni Core software client in what it says is "effectively a temporary hard fork to the Omni Layer."

5 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. SFYL by Baron_Yam · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They have a script, you know. This has been played out over and over and over and it pretty much always ends the same way - with the criminals fading away and the 'investors' moving on to get fleeced by the next crypto scam.

  2. Does not instill confidence by sinij · · Score: 4, Insightful

    >>>but is not aware of either who the attacker is, or how the attack took place

    This does not instill confidence.

    1. Re:Does not instill confidence by thereitis · · Score: 3, Insightful

      On the other hand, if my credit card gets stolen then it's insured against loss. I don't pay a nickel. How are crypto currencies ever going to provide a similar safeguard without centralization of some sort?

    2. Re:Does not instill confidence by Interfacer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They're not. There's also absolutely no way to 'undo' transactions if someone makes a mistake. The only option that exists is to do a hard-fork, revert the entire blockchain to a point where one or more specific transactions have not happened. This has happened once, with the DAO hack and the Ethereum hard fork which was done to mitigate it.

      This is obviously very risky because you risk destroying the project if the fork does not get universal support. The only reason it was a success for Ethereum was that the project at that point was still fairly small, and the amount involved was a single transaction and none of the coin had propagated to other places. These days it would be all but impossible to pull off the same support for a hard fork. People who were victims of the recent Parity fuck-up in which a million ETH tokens are frozen forever: they're SOL. I am fairly certain there's not going to be a hard fork.

      So you are correct: from a consumer standpoint, crypto currency has several advantages, but also several downsides.

  3. All of this has happened before. by Kaenneth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You want to give me shiny lumps of metal for my goats, are you insane?

    You want to give me slips of paper backed by shiny lumps of metal for my goats, are you insane?

    You want to give me slips of paper not backed by shiny lumps of metal for my goats, are you insane?

    You want to give me data backed by paper not backed by shiny lumps of metal for my goats, are you insane?

    You want to give me data not backed by paper not backed by shiny lumps of metal for my goats, are you insane? --- where we are now