A group of vigilante hackers stole $75 million worth of Ethereum that was vulnerable due to a bug in the wallet code but claim that they plan to give it back to its rightful owners.
In one of a series of Ethereum heists this week, a group of hackers who noticed a vulnerability in the code of a popular crypto-wallet platform claimed around $75 million worth of the Ether tokens in order to prevent others from swooping in and claiming the currency for themselves. They’ve announced that they plan to give the funds back to their rightful owners.
In a separate incident on Wednesday, $30 million was stolen from wallets created by the smart contract coding company Parity. According to a developer on Twitter, the vulnerability in the code was the result of a single missing word: internal.
The parity wallet bug:https://t.co/ydL2HbjURF
Missing an 'internal'.
I know how it feels.— Christoph Jentzsch (@ChrJentzsch) July 19, 2017
The Ether was stolen out of the wallets from three projects who just went through the “ICO” phase, which stands for Initial Coin Offering — a play on Initial Public Offering.
Just a few days ago, hackers stole $7 million out of wallets that were participating in the CoinDash ICO. The theft accomplished by simply replacing the legitimate Ethereum wallet address on the CoinDash website with the wallet address of the hackers.
Despite these issues, many analysts believe that Ethereum could play a significant role in the future of finance and enterprise communication. As of July 2017, Ethereum has a market capitalization of well over $20 billion.
Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about economics and higher education for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com
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