Bitcoin still at the mercy of Inflation Bug

Bitcoin still at the mercy of Inflation Bug

Per a recent report by Bitcoin node stats, 60.22 % of Bitcoin’s full nodes are still at the mercy of inflation bugs. The bug reportedly is the CVE-2018–17144 bug and purportedly allows miners to artificially inflate Bitcoin’s supply via double input.

Dashjr further explained that “Frankly, looking at just listening nodes isn’t a very useful metric — non-listening nodes are just as relevant.”

It is being said that due to detrimental consequences of the bug, the developers decided to keep it under wraps. They only revealed that bug made the network vulnerable to Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

The stats further claim that 99,638 Bitcoin full-nodes are about ten times higher than reported by most bitcoin analytics platforms.

The Next Web cited Dashjr as explaining that the discrepancy is due to such platforms only including listening full-nodes.

At the beginning of February, EOS.io, handed over bug bounties for five critical vulnerabilities this year.

Per a recent report by cybersecurity company, MalwareBytes cryptojacking targeting customers are almost extinct. After mining service Coinhive closed in mid-March, cryptojacking has seen a sharp decline. However, attacks which target firms and business have increased in the last quarter.

As reported by CoinMarketFeed, the mining operations ceased on March 8, 2019. However, users were permitted to access dashboards till April 30, 2019. A major reason for the closure is attributed to the large drop in hash rate (50%), which followed the last Monero (XMR) hard fork.
Also, the service was a victim to the crypto market bloodbath, with the value of XMR dropping 85% within a year.

The report further mentions that Bitcoin holders using Electrum wallets have lost over $2.3 Million owing to a Trojanised version of the Wallet. For cryptojacking, the chosen cryptocurrency is often privacy-centric coin Monero, as it can be mined easily on laptops.

Also, CheckPoint, an Israeli cybersecurity firm in its Global Threat Index stated that the top three malwares causing menace were all related to cryptojacking and Coinhive.In May last year, Coinhive’s crypto mining script was detected on more than 300 government and university websites worldwide.

A recent Kaspersky Labs report made a revelation that cryptojacking is now a bigger security threat than ransomware. Especially, in the Middle East and Turkey. The targets are not limited to PC users but smartphone users as well. In a span of two years (i.e) 2016 to 2018, these attacks have increased by 10%.

In February, tech giant Microsoft removed 8 window applications from the app store after Symantec, a cybersecurity firm found malicious XMR mining code. Symantec noted that while the apps provided privacy policies, they omitted any mention of cryptocurrency mining.

Published at Tue, 07 May 2019 06:03:58 +0000