Ropsten under attack

Ropsten, the test network for future Ethereum solutions, has sustained a hack attack. The network is designed to be a testing ground for protocol updates in order to finetune them before issuing in the main blockchain. Currently, the Byzantium hard-fork is under testing there, and these attacks seem to have paused the tests.

However, the development team has detected the attack in time and decided to increase the price of transactions, effectively making the way hackers chose too expensive. This increase has influenced the development progress as well, and the team can’t conduct some important tests related to Byzantium.

The main Ethereum network is working as usual, and the reason why hackers chose the test network, where the test currency does not have any real value, is unclear. Some, including the developers, suggest that this is just a trolling, that hackers attacked Ropsten purely for entertainment. Or maybe, they might have tested their tools on it as well, understanding the concept of a “test network” a bit differently than developers.