Verge seriously hacked again, 35M coins mined on low difficulty
The mining algorithm of Verge (XVG) is far from ideal, as clearly witnessed from the latest news on its hack. An unknown hacker has played on the timestamp verification vulnerability. This resembles the offline financial crime with fake payment vouchers - a person sends a seemingly-verified data which gives the right for money, and the issuer is unknowingly helping the criminal to enrich.
This became possible because of the DDoS attack resulting in the “time warp exploit”. Hackers have achieved control over 51% of the network and opened it up to this threat. The media tells hackers had been able to mine 35 million XVG units ahead of time. In a very notable tweet, creator of Litecoin Charlie Lee is gloating about the rivals’ failure:
Verge mining is being exploited again. Someone has 51% attacked and taken over the Verge network again. PornHub transactions are being reversed!
— Charlie Lee (@SatoshiLite) May 22, 2018
Using 5 mining algorithms actually made it much worse. This is a great blog explaining what's happening: https://t.co/euf76UdDHN
Contrarily to the statement, some sources say that there had been no complaints about the reversed transactions. This might mean that hackers were only interested in the mining exploit.
Naturally, the price of XVG has dramatically fallen (Coinmarketcap shows -12.51% in the last 24 hours). Almost the same motion is described in Bitnewstoday’s April report on a very similar hack.
Image: metro.news