Verge (XVG) Cryptocurrency Got Hacked, 51% Attack

The “Privacy Coin” community, Verge (XVG), had suffered from a 51% major attack, losing as much as 25% of its value. It was an attack by a malevolent miner who took his hands on and control the Verge network hashrate. A bug allowed manipulation of block mining timestamps. This created the potential for illegitimate coins to appear from nowhere. This feature makes it possible for the controlling entity to modify transactions, which obviously calls the integrity of the entire blockchain into question.

The real numbers point out that around 250,000 coins are stolen by the attacker. This attack carried on for about 3 hours. This called for a rollback on the blockchain in order to undo the damage. The lead developer from verge, Justin, posted an emergency commit to fix the problem, temporarily (of course) that was successful- even so only on the second attempt.

The attacker while being able to control the XVG hashrate, was able to mine multiple blocks one second apart, all performed using a single algorithm, something that obviously should be impossible to do.

Here is an ocminer that, on Wednesday April 4, announced and detailed this attack.

On a blog post, the supposed attacker wrote

“Hey Verge Team, get some real developers and fix your code. We have found another 2 exploits which can make quick hashes as well”

At least one verge holder already was fooled by a Twitter scam, and he wrote:

“I visited some hours ago the official Verge Twitter profile to read the news about the hash hack. While reading the tweet I noticed several messages offering a compensation for the attack by Verge. Send x ETH and you get some bonus back. Sounded legit to me as it was affiliated to the hash attack and I suffered from it as well having some hours only orphaned blocks on all my baikals, hence I fall victim to this damn scam on the official twitter page.”

The verge team after the attack tweeted  that it was just a “small hash attack “

We had a small hash attack that lasted about 3 hours earlier this morning, it’s been cleared up now. We will be implementing even more redundancy checks for things of this nature in the future! $XVG “https://twitter.com/hashtag/vergefam?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#vergefam

— vergecurrency (@vergecurrency) April 4, 2018

It was decided by Verge to be announcing about a major partnership 16th of this month, and this was a cryptocurrency that was starting to go on a runner up, on their price value.The attack caused a price drop of around 25-30% in last 24-36 hours.

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