- This follows from a firm report commissioned by Dogecoin.
- Found vulnerabilities could lead to $25 billion in damage to cryptocurrencies
Yesterday, March 13, cybersecurity firm Halborn published new report. It talks about some critical vulnerabilities in most popular blockchains.
Halborn undertook this research as part of an agreement with the developers of Dogecoin. The company did its job, after which the vulnerabilities were eliminated.
Halborn also contacted Litecoin and Zcash. They also did work to find and fix bugs. But the problem remains relevant for at least 280 other blockchains.
Halborn claims that the potential damage is $25 billion in cryptocurrency. To prevent this, the company contacted other teams.
The discovered commonality of vulnerabilities was codenamed Rab13s. Halborn highlighted three exploits in particular. One of them allows a criminal to send malicious, consistent messages to individual nodes, which provokes their closure.
This, in turn, makes the network vulnerable to a 51% attack. This is a scenario in which a hacker controls a large portion of the hashrate or stakes in order to fork the network or take it offline.
Other vulnerabilities can also bring the network to a complete halt. This is called “zero day” or “zeroing”, which is fraught with extremely serious consequences up to complete elimination.
Earlier, we reported that the PRC allegedly developed a mechanism for hacking bitcoin and any encrypted system based on RSA. Details at the link.
