It seems like digital currencies like Bitcoin will never stay out of trouble. And any day could turn out to be the last day for digital money infrastructures. Here, we are talking about the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.
While developers are issuing the patch for anyone running nodes and appeal to update the software, Bitcoin miners don’t seem to stop down. They are continuously flooding full node operators with traffic via DDoS.
The patch confirms that DDoS vulnerability (CVE-2018-17144) has been discovered in Bitcoin versions 0.14.0 up to 0.16.2, which could be exploited by miners. It recommends users to upgrade their Bitcoin software to 0.16.3 to avoid any mishaps.
Apparently, attacking Bitcoin is not as easy as it sounds. In this case, the offender will have to sacrifice almost $80,000 worth of Bitcoin to disrupt the entire infrastructure. However, a notorious mind who is ready to give away 12.5BTC ($80,000) could possess a substantial threat to Bitcoin.
Responding to potential havoc on bitcoin, cryptocurrency advocate Andreas Antonopolous tweeted –
BU has shipped an exploitable bug on a code base that is 0.001 of the size of Core’s. That’s several orders of magnitude worse QA process
— Andreas M. Antonopoulos (@aantonop) March 15, 2017
Bitcoin supporters think the vulnerability is not a significant concern since Bitcoin is massively decentralized and cannot possibly be taken down by a single offender. However, TheNextWeb notes the situation could have been way worse — if buggy cryptocurrencies decided to fork the Bitcoin Core version, susceptible to DDoS.
Responding to new vulnerabilities is essential for the blockchain community to maintain transparency in the whole technology. And as for the threat, it would surely take more than that to make Bitcoin collapse.
