Near impossible mining speeds on Verge cryptocurrency using new exploit.
We all know that not all crypto-coins are still mineable. A few are still within the limit of blocks they are programmed to create.
Mining can be very tedious, time consuming and expensive. But this fella over here has made some tremendous breakthrough, although he did this illegally and against the status quo of things. He has helped others by showing them the weakness and loopholes in their programs.
An unknown hacker exploited a vulnerability in the Verge cryptocurrency platform which allowed an attacker to mine the coin at nearly 1,560 Verge coins (XVG), or about US$ 78 (£55), per second.
An unknown hacker exploited a vulnerability in the Verge cryptocurrency platform which allowed an attacker to mine the coin at nearly 1,560 Verge coins (XVG), or about US$ 78 (£55), per second.
The incident took place April 4 and has led some users to suspect the attacker had found a ">51% attack” , in which they had taken control of more than half of the network's nodes allowing the threat actor to forge transactions. “A mining exploit was found that allowed for script blocks (one of our five algorithms) to be submitted with very low difficulty,”. The company told the Media via a Twitter message exchange.The company was hit with a similar attack which affected crypto wallets last year(and still proper upgrade wasn't made to prevent future recurrence).
Bleeping Computer reported Verge 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.
Although the attack only lasted three hours, some
unofficial reports estimated the attacker made off with 19 million verge coins, the equivalent of $1,373,544 the firm told SC Media. News of the attack may have also led to a temporary drop in the exchange rate that occurred during the same time period as the attack.
The cryptocurrency company denied the speculation of a ">51% attack” and later said that the hackers exploited a blockchain vulnerability related to one of the mining algorithms, according to an April 9 Medium blog post. According to Investopia, a 51 percent attack refers to an attack on a blockchain – usually bitcoin's , for which such an attack is still hypothetical – by a group of miners controlling more than 50% of the network's mining hash rate, or computing power.
The firm reported that they have updated the system with a patch to prevent the algorithm from being submitted too many times in a row and are building a new block verification system to prevent further exploitation and to deliver a better service.
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