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Once Hailed As Unhackable, Blockchains Are Now Getting Hacked (technologyreview.com)
schwit1 shares a report from MIT Technology Review: Early last month, the security team at Coinbase noticed something strange going on in Ethereum Classic, one of the cryptocurrencies people can buy and sell using Coinbase's popular exchange platform. Its blockchain, the history of all its transactions, was under attack. An attacker had somehow gained control of more than half of the network's computing power and was using it to rewrite the transaction history. That made it possible to spend the same cryptocurrency more than once -- known as "double spends." The attacker was spotted pulling this off to the tune of $1.1 million. Coinbase claims that no currency was actually stolen from any of its accounts. But a second popular exchange, Gate.io, has admitted it wasn't so lucky, losing around $200,000 to the attacker (who, strangely, returned half of it days later).
Just a year ago, this nightmare scenario was mostly theoretical. But the so-called 51% attack against Ethereum Classic was just the latest in a series of recent attacks on blockchains that have heightened the stakes for the nascent industry. [...] In short, while blockchain technology has been long touted for its security, under certain conditions it can be quite vulnerable. Sometimes shoddy execution can be blamed, or unintentional software bugs. Other times it's more of a gray area -- the complicated result of interactions between the code, the economics of the blockchain, and human greed. That's been known in theory since the technology's beginning. Now that so many blockchains are out in the world, we are learning what it actually means -- often the hard way.
Just a year ago, this nightmare scenario was mostly theoretical. But the so-called 51% attack against Ethereum Classic was just the latest in a series of recent attacks on blockchains that have heightened the stakes for the nascent industry. [...] In short, while blockchain technology has been long touted for its security, under certain conditions it can be quite vulnerable. Sometimes shoddy execution can be blamed, or unintentional software bugs. Other times it's more of a gray area -- the complicated result of interactions between the code, the economics of the blockchain, and human greed. That's been known in theory since the technology's beginning. Now that so many blockchains are out in the world, we are learning what it actually means -- often the hard way.
First off, 51% is an attack not a hack. Second, exchanges have ways to adjust minimum transaction confirmations to almost eliminate any threat from such attacks. A lot of wallets for PoS and other coins have added algorithms and checkpoints to practically eliminate most of the 51% attack vectors also. It's still an ongoing threat but if the coin still matters the ecosystem responds and shuts most attacks down pretty swiftly and with minimal to no loss.
If I didn't know better, it would be as if someone had massive computing and decryption capacity to break codes and decided that North Korea and Russia were not going to keep getting the money they've been getting.
Either that or someone got bored.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
https://theintercept.com/2018/... (March 21 2018)
Recall OAKSTAR and MONKEYROCKET.
Thats internet use with search, password details and MAC. With bait software.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Who in their right mind have not suspected that one cryptocurrency network or other had not been designed for Chinese Lottery attacks against hashing functions in the first place?
Of course, there would need to be a backdoor somewhere, of some fashion. And of course some attacker would find it sooner or later.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
When you put billions in wealth out in the open for the world to see, and then encourage and reward every evil doer in the world to use it for their evil things, the evil doers will figure out ways to do evil.
Mostly theoretical lol, no it fucking wasn't. It was a well known vulnerability that hadn't been extensively exploited yet. that is not "theoretical", their was no doubt about the vulnerability or that it has been used many times.
I suppose it depends on how evenly distributed it was, but still.
Also, a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but it sounds like you're counting on the exchanges for security. Given how quickly they spin up that seems like a recipe for disaster.
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This is the reason we have Bitcoin; Bitcoin is sound money, and the software running Bitcoin is designed to run for decades. And we have the word: Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is alone, others are just scams for most of them, or useless for the remaining. Bitcoin defined scarcity; the others are just a way for some software developers to print money. A 51% attack is just a reminder that you can't secure any software junk.
The problem with many of these coins that get hacked is that they were designed with a rushed software developer's mindset, not a true and methodical engineering one. There was a huge rush to market after bitcoin took off, and only after bitcoin took off did its flaws begin to manifest themselves. Cryptocoin networks should not be like some typical software companies code, where if there's a bug, you just patch or fix it. Sadly many coin were developed that way, and the flaws kept permeating through these coins because lazy coders "borrowed code" from other coins. On the other hand, you have a project like Cardano, where every element was designed from the ground up from peer-reviewed research papers that were submitted to top infosec conferences and vetted by 3 panels of experts in their field just to be accepted. Written in Haskell so that every function could be mapped to lambda calculus and mathematically analyzed in a formal manner, and then all the code is audited by a third party prior to release. Sooner or later all coin projects will have to be designed that way, by adults and not by some eager hackers trying to get rich.
Sensationalistic crap. No one ever claimed blockchains are unhackable by nature of being blockchains. A blockchain’s security is proportional to the number an diversity of devices mining and nodes forming the consensus. Dying forks like Ethereum Classic are bound to get hacked. That is just part of the final death throes of a blockchain.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
Guru Meditation #6d416769.21610a21
It's probably better than New Etherium, anyways.
There is no protection against a 51% attack that wipes the entire ledger.
People focus on the supposed "incorruptibility" aspect of blockchain, but with 51% of the network you can erase it completely. That's the real problem, that an actor could theoretically wipe the whole chain out, start-to-finish.
The problem here is the diversity of "me too" get rich quick coins which have much less proof-of-work power protecting their block chain. If I've got generic compute power that is 5% of Bitcoin's hash rate, I can point it at any of these other scamcoins and be 95%. There can be only one secure cryptocurrency, unless the other late-comers uses a vastly different and completely computationally incompatible proof-of-work scheme.
Trump hasn't solved any bubble problems. He's stuck in his bubble headed off to prison...
What reality do you live in where Pence won't pardon him?
Yet another advantage of XRP is that it doesn't use mining to secure it's ledger, so this sort of attack is not possible.
To attack XRP would require 81% of all validators to collude. Since there is no direct monetary incentive to run a validating node, and clients can choose which nodes they can trust, if anyone were to pull off an 81% attack against XRP it would suggest the coin was no longer useful for any serious purpose whatsoever.
That would be constitutionally correct, although if you think Pelosi would resign you need to share whatever you're smoking.....
It seems to me that this is yet another reason to get rid of "proof of work" and go to "proof of stake". With proof of stake, you still have a possible 51% attack, but you have no motivation to do so. If some group owns 51% of a currency, and starts stealing, they will tank the value of their own stake.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
So no hack, but the fundamentals still hold. These types of attacks have been going over the years so nothing much new.
Of course, there have been many years to develop ASIC's and FPGA algorithms for many coin algos. And since miners started dumping their GPU's, maybe cheaper to get a big, more generic hash power. Especially these smaller coins can then be vulnerable, and there can only be so many reasonable hash variants or resources for constant changes.
PoS is an interesting alternative but many still value their privacy and for that I guess it is not so good at this time.
"Coinbase claims that no currency was actually stolen from any of its accounts."
No data gets ever 'stolen', not movies, not music, not passwords not cryptocurrencies.
They just get copied.
And that applies also to quantum cryptography due to its vulnerable nodes at least.
E Proelio Veritas.
" giving Hillary the position she rightfully would have won"
You fucking moron. She never once rightfully held ANYTHING.
"Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House" is the book written by Donna Brazile that details it all.
Get your head out of your fucking ass.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This is why we don't need 600+ different cryptocurrencies. Someone with a fairly small ASIC farm can target a tiny blockchain and >50% it (that's the real name, not 51%) and steal everything.
wouldn't that make the scenario you're describing profitable to them? Or if somebody just does what Bain capital and other leveraged buyout firms do and buys up 51% of the stock to again cash out?
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Correct link:
Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked