Bitcoin Node Numbers Fall After Spam Transaction 'Attack'
The number of reachable nodes has declined further following an "attack" that overloaded the bitcoin network. Last week, an unknown actor sent a deluge of spam that left bitcoin's nodes - the clients that store and relay transactions - with upwards of 88,000, or 1GB worth, waiting in their collective memory pool. As Jay Feldis from hardware node maker BitSeed explained to CoinDesk, many low-spec nodes simply could not keep up: "Eventually, the transaction backlog fills-up the RAM memory of the nodes. This causes the node computers to slow down dramatically or even freeze-up. If a node....
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As Bitcoin blocks get closer to full capacity, some members of the community are claiming many of the transactions on the network are nothing more than spam. Defining a spam transaction on the Bitcoin network is somewhat difficult. In fact, Mastering Bitcoinauthor Andreas Antonopoulos believes it’s impossible for such transactions to exist. According to Antonopoulos, the fact that someone is willing to pay the fee associated with a particular transaction means that the transaction is not spam by default. During a meetup at Paralelni Polis in Prague, Czech Republic, Antonopoulos explained....
New information has come to light regarding the latest bitcoin spam attack which has exposed the weakness of the bitcoin network. The attack group is now targeting the non-profit, journalistic organization WikiLeaks and the Reddit clone Voat, according to a Motherboard report. Dust or thousands of tiny bitcoin transactions are now hitting WikiLeaks and Voat. However, there is no news regarding why the two are being targeted. Earlier this week, the bitcoin network witnessed an onslaught of thousands of tiny bitcoin transactions aimed at clogging the network and bringing it down. The....
Bitcoin Classic has fallen under siege recently to DDoS attacks that are targeting anyone running a Bitcoin Classic node on their server. One of Bitcoin.com’s servers was DDoSed with 591 Mbps and was shut down by the ISP for a period of four hours in order to prevent problems for other customers. The attack was the result of a DNS amplifier attack, which....
I am a Gmail user, and I filter all my mailboxes through Gmail. I don't find spam too annoying at the moment because Google catches almost all spam before it reaches my inbox. If anything, I find false positives (legitimate mail sent to spam) more annoying than false negatives (spam in the inbox). But that could change with new generations of blockchain-based spambots. It's a story as old as time, or at least as old as the Internet. Spammers have always found new creative ways to invade our mailboxes, and they have always been early adopters of new Internet technologies. Now, they are....
One of Bitcoin's core security guarantees is that, for an attacker to be able to successfully interfere with the Bitcoin network and block and reverse transactions, they need to have more computing power than the rest of the Bitcoin network combined. The reason for this is that the Bitcoin network builds up its transaction history in the form of a "blockchain", with a random node adding a new block on top of the previous block every ten minutes. To reverse a transaction, an attacker would need to make a transaction and then "fork" the blockchain one block behind the block the transaction....