Verge Cryptocurrency Suspiciously Being Hacked
Verge is another cryptocurrency that aims to be an improved version of Bitcoin. It guarantees faster transactions and provides real privacy. Adult content sites] and a recent health sector company is partnering with Verge for establishing crypto payment options for their customers. However, their platform seemed to get attacked from this Monday 21st May and it's currently under investigation.
Users from Bitcointalk.org site reported an anomaly within the Verge mining difficulty which went down from 320 to 0.002 points in about three hours. Then the zero mining difficulty remained to execute for five hours until their algorithms started to increase back again. This event would possibly have allowed a suspect attacker to mine this crypto at a faster rate.
See chart available at: https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/verge-difficulty-chart
Not much has been told by Verge twitter page, "it appears some mining pools are under DDoS attack, and we are experiencing a delay in our blocks, we are working to resolve this."
Yet, the attacker had probably made millions of XVG coin already again, 35M XVG were generated in 8 hours and roughly 50.000 blocks were possibly mined by him.
Scrypt and Lyra2re difficulty algorithms were taken down to zero. Credit: Reddit
This attack is not the only one, last April, XVG was hacked for three hours using two techniques, timestamp spoofing and lowering difficulty on Scrypt, one of the five algorithms that Verge use for mining its cryptocurrency. It looks like that this platform has not been patched successfully and the new attack was performed over two of the five Proof of Work PoW, algorithms, Scrypt and Lyra2re respectively.
These attacks are putting Verge and their purpose under observation as they are promising that their currency and blockchain platform provides better advantages over Bitcoin. Although Bitcoin is not a perfect solution with some exchanges and wallets being attacked and funds were stolen in the past, Bitcoin hasn't been hacked at its core protocol level yet. Hopefully, everything works well for Verge developers and get their head out under this hacking storm.
Ref: https://blog.theabacus.io/the-verge-hack-explained-7942f63a3017 The Verge Hack, Explained
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