New 51% attack on ZenCash, hackers’ revenue makes $550,000
ZenCash has become yet another digital currency which has suffered from a 51% attack. This type of malicious activity allows to take control of the majority of the nodes in the blockchain network, which allows hackers to mine digital coins much faster than they would have been able to do under normal conditions.
The news has been directly confirmed by the official social media channels of ZenCash:
The ZenCash network was the target of a 51% attack on 2 June at approximately 10:43 pm EDT. The ZenCash team immediately executed mitigation procedures to significantly increase the difficulty of future attacks on the network. Read more here https://t.co/Eh9eabz9vV
— ZenCashOfficial [No Free ETH] (@zencashofficial) June 3, 2018
In less than 4 hours, hackers have made $550,000 by using double spend transactions by reorganizing 38 units of the blockchain.
ZenCash joins the list of victims of a 51% attack which has lately been expanding fast: Bitcoin Gold and Verge have experienced the same security breach. Seeing speculations about Litecoin, its creator Charlie Lee has noted that this type of attack would be expensive for hackers.
The future coming of quantum computers can make similar attacks possible in a matter of seconds. The dangers of this innovation for modern cryptocurrencies have been confirmed by the University of Sydney and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. Most small altcoins' developers do not seem to bother with the progress of computing hardware which can prove to be their ultimate undoing.
Image: CryptoPost