The DAO Attacked: Code Issue Leads to $60 Million Ether Theft
The DAO, the distributed autonomous organization that had collected over $150m worth of the cryptocurrency ether, has reportedly been hacked, sparking a broad market sell-off. A leaderless organization comprised of a series of smart contracts written on the ethereum codebase, The DAO has lost 3.6m ether, which is currently sitting in a separate wallet after being split off into a separate grouping dubbed a "child DAO". Ether markets plunged on the news, falling below $13 in trading on the cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex. With ether currently trading at roughly $17.50 per coin,....
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I woke this morning to the sound of dozens of message notifications in rapid succession. The DAO had been attacked. More than $50 million worth of ether had already been drained. At least one technical solution had already been proposed. Some people like it, some don't. In addition to the technical remedies, some have asked about legal remedies that might be available against The DAO hacker. Could they be criminally or civilly liable? Could they be sued? If so, how? And if so, by whom? Some thoughts on this topic follow, below. Criminal law. State and federal criminal statutes are....
The DAO is being attacked for some hours, according to Griff Green, a spokesperson for Slockit. In an ongoing emergency situation currently developing Griff Green, a spokesperson for Slockit, has put out an emergency alert. He asked anyone who has a DAO split open, especially Congo Split, to message him at the Dao slack. It is not clear what is developing, but the dao is currently being drained of Ether with the balance falling below 9 million ether from 12 million raised and continuing to fall. Griff Green stated: “The DAO is being attacked. It has been going on for 3-4 hours, it is....
Europe's primary bitcoin payment processor for merchants and free online wallet service, BIPS, was the target of a major DDoS attack and subsequent theft in the past few days that saw 1,295 BTC (just over $1m on CoinDesk's BPI) stolen. Kris Henriksen, BIPS' CEO, said most of the missing funds were "from the company's own holdings". BIPS uses an algorithm, based on supply and demand, to work out the amount of bitcoins it needs to keep it in a 'hot wallet'. The heist, however, was apparently not due to any vulnerability in the code itself. He also said merchants who had chosen to instantly....
A QR code (Quick Response Code) like this may be the future of digital currency. When scanned with a mobile device, a QR code can be used to send and receive digital currency. A few weeks ago, I saw a funny comic. The comic portrayed a thief who demands a woman's money. She says she only has bitcoins, and the thief doesn't understand. He asks her to give it to him, but she explains that it's not tangible and that she needs his bitcoin wallet address. Upon learning that he doesn't have a wallet, she helps him set one up. Will this be the future of theft? Will thieves hold people up until....
On March 1, web hosting provide Linode's servers were hacked, resulting in a theft of 3000 BTC from Slush and, most severely, 43000 BTC from Bitcoinica. There have been two major Bitcoin heists before, one 25000 BTC theft in June and a 17000 BTC theft from the Bitcoin exchange bitomat.pl in August, resulting in the exchange being bailed out and acquired by MtGox. Security is a major issue in the Bitcoin community, and many are worried that if they want to carry out a significant portion of their economic activity in bitcoins their money will not be safe. Many traditional banking proponents....