Post
Topic
Board Press
Re: [2014-08-13] Bitcoin theft: Canadian hacker could be to blame
by
Carlton Banks
on 14/08/2014, 01:39:32 UTC

There was no theft of any private keys. The miners were hit with a man-in-the-middle attack that redirected them to a malicious mining pool where they kept receiving new blocks to work on, but were not paid their share for that work. The technical analysis is here:

http://www.secureworks.com/cyber-threat-intelligence/threats/bgp-hijacking-for-cryptocurrency-profit/


Thanks. The thieves stole hashing power via the Stratum protocol. It has nothing to do with the Bitcoin protocol nor were Bitcoins stolen. The article is misleading.

Stratum protocol wasn't the subect of the attack vector either. From what I've read, it's an exploit of the way all TCP/IP (internet protcol) traffic is routed from source to destination. There is inevitably several hops where the infrastructure of the internet (run by big telecom corporations) makes decisions as to where to send TCP/IP packets next as a part of completing the trip. The hackers targetted this part of the infrastructure, redirecting hashing from known pools to other pools (or possibly to their own mining setup, which adds even more intrigue). Comment suggested that insiders at telecoms were potential suspects, although this new report suggests otherwise.