Dark market web site Silk Road 2 has told customers that all of their bitcoins are gone after a massive hack, in which at least 4476 bitcoins are believed stolen. Organizers at the site are blaming the compromise on the transaction malleability attack in the news this week.
“Our initial investigations indicate that a vendor exploited a recently discovered vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol known as “transaction malleability” to repeatedly withdraw coins from our system until it was completely empty,” said a post from Defcon, one of the site’s moderators, on a forum, located on the Tor network.
The post added that thieves attacked after the organizers of the site took too long to respond to widespread industry concern about the transaction malleability attack. “Despite our hardening and pentesting procedures, this attack vector was outside of penetration testing scope due to being rooted in the Bitcoin protocol itself,” it said.
February 13, 2014 at 10:45PM
