Loading...The Verge team was too late to fix the system. XVG has suffered the “51% attacak” again as one of users of Bitcointalk forums, ocminer, revealed yesterday, 21 of May: “Since nothing really was done about the previous attacks (only a band-aid), the attackers now simply use two algos to fork the chain for their own use and are gaining millions. Both algos, scrypt and lyra2re can be rented easily for a few dollars, they simply send one block scrypt, after that a block lyra2re and so on and all with manipulated timestamps thus lowering diff to lowest possible mining several blocks per minute like this”.
The recent update for the aftermath of the hacker’s attack is that roughly 50 thousand blocks were possibly mined from the attacker resulting in around $1,9 million value. As far for Verge coins, 35 million XVG were generated in a few hours. This also means there is still no fix and this is possible at any time again. Meanwhile the only official info out there is “mining pools are DdoS’d”. This attack has occurred second time, and all down the same way except two algorithms were necessary to take over the XVG chain. Curiously that there are not only technical bugs haunt the Verge team. A few weeks ago their official Twitter account was also hacked.
Verge applies five various cryptographic algorithms for mining, changing to a new one for each block, but the attacker figured out a way to fake the timestamps of his/her or its blocks, permitting them to be delivered all with one algorithm. Because of this, he/she or it was able to get a control over the majority of the network’s mining power with considerably less computing power than would routinely be required.
The attack is especially adamant as it demands a hard fork to exclude the blocks the attacker has mined. It also makes eyes round because it testifies that even a seemingly foolproof PoW system can be compromised. Now the attacker owns only one hash algorithm: he waits for opportunity window when chosen algorithm blocks are all in the first half of 10 block span, mine out 5 blocks in a row. It’s worth to note most hacks do things “permissive” by poorly thought out code. There’s no precedent of legal action against attacks on P2P distributed systems like this. Then there’s opportunity of extra-legal actions if crypto exchanges are ready to block the cash out.
Verge that boasts of being “anonymous and safe coin” lost at the moment almost the one fourth of its value just for a few hours but then a bit recovered. XVG still bears day loss of 7,32% and trades at $0,0501 level.
