Ethereum Network Faces Computational DDoS Attack

Ethereum is surely getting into trouble. Promising smart contracts protocol based on blockchain is facing loads of issues recently, with the most recent one being a DOS attack again.

The attacker has carried out several Ether transactions causing miners, servers which process the transactions, to launch 50,000 more queries on Ethereum network prior to validating the original transaction.

Jeffrey Wilcke, Co-founder of Ethereum, ensures that effect of the DOS attack is restricted to slowdown of network, and there was no consensus failure or overload of memory because of that attack. Newsbtc.com posted on September 23rd, 2016, that Jeffrey Wilcke also recommended that miners should switch to Parity mining from the Geth mining for avoiding the issue.

Jeffrey Wilcke from team Ethereum said "we have currently identified several routes for a more sustainable medium-term fix and have developers working on implementation".

The last DOS attack has seen the developers of Ethereum fixing the issue. Though, the consecutivity of the 2 attacks make one to reconsider whether the applications of blockchain technology are matured enough for using in the mainstream financial and banking sectors.

Ethereum has already experienced failure of DAO. In trying to raise additional funds, they focused on DAO and thus already discredited system. Already it has resulted Ethereum to introduce a hard fork that led to creation of 2 cryptocurrency versions - Ethereum Classic and Ethereum.

A warning was also issued by Bitcoin network, in August, for possible state-sponsored attacks on its network.

In June, DAO, the joint investment fund developed on top of Ethereum network got hacked and the attacker took away nearly all the funds. Team of Ethereum issued a hard-fork for reversing the transactions which stole the money of users.

The team of Ethereum is currently working on the network level fix. Some workarounds are available temporarily for the Ether miners, who are using Go lang implementation of Ethereum protocol.

Ehtereum network has survived the attack because of a significant reason, i.e. providing multiple mining client alternatives along with Go implementation.

» SPAMfighter News - 9/29/2016