Privacy-Centric Coin Verge Suffers Massive Reorganization Attack, Developers Say Funds Are Safe

Pornhub payment option Verge (XVG) is suffering from a brutal attack that allowed malicious actors to orchestrate what appears to be one of the deepest block reorganizations in blockchain history.

Coin Metrics data engineer Antoine Le Calvez was one of the first to report the incident, highlighting that the attack involved more than 560,000 blocks.

Looks like $XVG (Verge) experienced a massive 560k+ blocks reorg.@coinmetrics' node is on a new chain whose last common ancestor with the previous chain dates to July 2020.

— Antoine Le Calvez (@khannib) February 15, 2021

Coin Metrics researcher Lucas Nuzzi adds that the attack erased more than six months’ worth of XVG transactions in what is likely the deepest block reorganization in a top 100 cryptocurrency.

A blockchain reorganization happens when miners controlling a majority of the hashpower collaborate to erase confirmed blocks from the blockchain. In doing so, the attackers can spend funds, erase the transaction, and spend the same funds for a second time.

Verge’s official Twitter account has acknowledged the attack and says the development team has released a fix that prevents damage.

In a new medium post, Verge core team member Alex Ederer summarizes what the attacker tried to do but failed.

“Mine on sidechain for months with reduced diff.

Spawn enough daemons to go + 50% of the total amount of full nodes.

The chain is rebuilt on top of that sidechain.

Top that with huge mining power on your new chain.

Use the Verge you just mined to pay for mining power.”

We have written a short explainer of what went down in the last 24 hours.
Your funds are SAFU,

thanks everyone for your concern, feel free to reach us on our social media handles. $XVGhttps://t.co/7Gg86cUlqs

— VergeCurrency (@vergecurrency) February 15, 2021

The coin, which is designed to facilitate completely anonymous transactions, has a history of being a target of bad actors. In April 2018 and May 2018, Verge got hit by two separate but less serious network exploits.

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