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Hacker Uses Exploit To Generate Verge Cryptocurrency Out of Thin Air (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: An unknown attacker has exploited a bug in the Verge cryptocurrency network code to mine Verge coins at a very rapid pace and generate funds almost out of thin air. The Verge development team is preparing a hard-fork of the entire cryptocurrency code to fix the issue and revert the blockchain to a previous state before the attack to neutralize the hacker's gains. The attack took place yesterday, and initially users thought it was a over "51% attack," an attack where a malicious actor takes control over the more than half of the network nodes, giving himself the power to forge transactions. Nonetheless, users who later looked into the suspicious network activity eventually tracked down what happened, revealing that a mysterious attacker had mined Verge coins at a near impossible speed of 1,560 Verge coins (XVG) per second, the equivalent of $78/s. The malicious mining lasted only three hours, according to the Verge team. According to users who tracked the illegally mined funds on the Verge blockchain said the hacker appears to have made around 15.6 million Verge coins, which is around $780,000.
... That is the general idea.
If he'd kept the mining down to a high-but-not-suspicious level he could've mined for weeks and sold his Verge for USD nd walked away with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars by summer and maybe millions by Christmas.
Hmm, maybe he or one of is buddies did and this is his way of "shutting the whole exploit down."
We will probably never know.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The Verge development team is preparing a hard-fork of the entire cryptocurrency code to fix the issue and revert the blockchain to a previous state before the attack to neutralize the hacker's gains.
And to neutralize all the legit (if any) transactions, by the way, creating money out of thin air for those that spent it, and destroying it for those that received it.
Remember this if you are investing real money in Bitcoin, or any other well-known cryptocurrency: Some few people have the power to revert all operations back and make your money vanish, as proven here.