The Bitcoin Core development team has released an important update to patch a major DDoS vulnerability in its underlying software that could have been fatal to the Bitcoin Network, which is usually known as the most hack-proof and secure blockchain.
The DDoS vulnerability, identified as CVE-2018-17144, has been found in the Bitcoin Core wallet software, which could potentially be exploited by anyone capable of mining BTC to crash Bitcoin Core nodes running software versions 0.14.0 to 0.16.2.
In other words, Bitcoin miners could have brought down the entire blockchain either by overflooding the block with duplicate transactions, resulting in blockage of transaction confirmation from other people or by flooding the nodes of the Bitcoin P2P network and over-utilising the bandwidth.
The vulnerability had been around since March last year, but the team says nobody noticed the bug or nobody was willing to incur the expense of exploiting it.
According to the bitcoin core developers, all recent versions of the BTC system are possibly vulnerable to the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, though there’s a catch—attacking Bitcoin is not cheap.
The DDoS attack on the BTC network would cost miners 12.5 bitcoins, which is equal to almost $80,000 (£60,000), in order to perform successfully.
The Bitcoin Core team has patched the vulnerability and are urging miners to update with the latest Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 version as soon as possible.
images from Hacker News
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