An unknown hacker performed 51% attack of Bitcoin Gold’s cryptocurrency network and managed to assign over 18 million dollars to BTG (Bitcoin Gold), through double spending.
According to the post at the Bitcoin Gold forum, hacker attacks began last Friday, May 18th. The hacker used a large number of servers to gain control over half of the hashrate, carrying out a so-called 51% attack.
51% of the network’s power allowed the hacker to change the details of the blockchain transactions and make a second attack of “double spend”, which allows you to spend the same coins twice.
As the team Bitcoin Gold, the hacker used a combination of “51% attack” and “double spend” in order to seize the means of crypto exchanges.
“The costs of prolonged attacks are great. Because of their cost, attackers can make a profit only if they get something more valuable in return. Market participants, such as exchanges, can accept large deposits automatically, allowing users to quickly exchange them for other coins, and then automatically withdraw. Therefore, attackers are aimed at exchanges, “- explains the Bitcoin Gold team.
And the last few days this is what the hacker was doing. He placed large amounts of money in BTG coins on exchanges, but he also sent the same amount to himself on his wallet. By the time the stock exchange realized that the transactions were falsified, the hacker was already able to withdraw funds from the exchange and double its initial assets.
The hacker continued to connect more and more of the mining capacity to capture half of the Bitcoin Gold network and developed double-spend attacks.
The Bitcoin Gold team claims that the stolen funds were found on the BTG wallet at GTNjvCGssb2rbLnDV1xxsHmunQdvXnY2Ft. About 388,000 BTG passed through this account, which is equivalent to 18 million dollars.
A hacker does not steal user money but steals them from stock exchanges. And although none of the users were hurt, the attacks are still a danger, as they can destabilize the reserve funds, and if they continue, some crypto exchanges can go bankrupt.
One of the crypto exchange platforms, which cooperated with the Bitcoin Gold team in the investigation of the attack, believes that the same hacker has already tried to do the same thing in the Bitcoin network in the past.
Bitcoin Gold is a cryptocurrency created as a result of the fork of the original Bitcoin in November 2017. After the second hardfork, which brought Bitcoin Gold to the world, the project website went through a series of DDoS attacks, then scammers attacked Bitcoin Gold users through mybtgwallet.com. At the moment, the cryptocurrency is 27th by market capitalization.
