Bounties and Responsible Disclosure Bolstered Crypto Infrastructure This Year

Cryptocurrency transfers work because of the software developed by programmers like Satoshi Nakamoto and many other innovators along the way. As with all software, however, blockchain protocols are not perfect, and over the last decade black and white hat hackers have revealed many bugs. In 2018, developers earned over $878,000 in blockchain bug bounties by … Read more

These Developers Claim They Can Crack Any Hardware Wallet

On Dec. 27 at the 35th Annual Chaos Communication Congress (35C3) event, three individuals from a startup called Wallet Fail allegedly hacked the most popular hardware wallets and revealed their secrets on stage. According to Trezor, however, the hackers at 35C3 did not follow the standard responsible disclosure protocol and Ledger Wallet developers claim the … Read more

Critical Bug Found in Bitcoin Core Invokes the Multiple Client Argument

Over the last 24 hours, the cryptocurrency community has been discussing a critical vulnerability that was found in the Bitcoin Core (BTC) reference client. A bug introduced in Bitcoin Core version 0.14, that also affects all subsequent versions, could have caused a great majority of current Core nodes to crash. According to the developer’s Optech … Read more

25% of All Smart Contracts Contain Critical Bugs

For every problem that smart contracts solve, they seem to introduce another. In a week in which EOS has made news for all the wrong reasons over a RAM vulnerability, a code auditor has revealed the prevalence of smart contract bugs. Security firm Hosho, which has forged a new partnership with community managers Amazix, has … Read more

Ethereum Parity Full Nodes Suffer from Another Critical Issue

On June 6 the company Parity Technologies, the firm that maintains the Ethereum Parity full node client, issued a mandatory update for individuals and businesses who use the Parity software. According to the latest security alert, the client versions, 1.10.6-stable and 1.11.1-beta, had a consensus issue with the public test network Ropsten that could possibly … Read more

PR: Bitcoin-ABC incident report (26APR2018)

This document contains information regarding the response to a critical vulnerability applicable to miners of Bitcoin Cash using Bitcoin-ABC 0.17.0. Appropriate action has been taken to mitigate the impact of this vulnerability. This document is provided for information purposes only. Bitcoin ABC 0.17.1 fixes this problem. On 26APR2016 Bitcoin-ABC developers were notified by unknown person(s) … Read more

Exchanges Suspend ERC20 Token Deposits After Discovery of Smart Contract Bug

Ethereum’s smart contract bugs just keep on coming. Exchanges including Okex, Poloniex, Coinone, and Hitbtc today suspended deposits of ERC20 tokens following the discovery of a batch overflow bug written into the smart contracts governing numerous coins. The news comes in the same week that the ethereum community voted against restoring the lost ether that … Read more

15-Year-Old Security Researcher Shares Ledger Wallet Exploit

Hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger has published a firmware update to remedy several security flaws. The exploits were independently found by a trio of white hat security researchers, one of whom, Saleem Rashid, is a 15-year-old British boy. The attack vector he discovered is hardware based, and is not limited to Ledger devices, making it difficult … Read more

Report Claims 34,000 Ethereum Smart Contracts Are Vulnerable to Bugs

Over 34,000 ethereum smart contracts containing $4.4 million in ETH may be vulnerable to exploitation. That’s the conclusion reached by a quintet of researchers hailing from Singapore and the UK. Their technical report, which is currently undergoing peer review, suggests that millions of dollars in ether may be at risk from poorly coded smart contracts … Read more