Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRnXDG15nKU
Users
Exchanges
- Cold/hot storage
Assets
- Nodes
- Wallets
- Smart Contracts
BlockFi - lost customer PII, Employee SIM, ported to access internal portal
- SIM Porting == rerouting cell traffic to bypass 2FA when mobile is used. A BlockFi admin was hacked in this way
Coincheck - Lost PII for 200 customers & Domain Registrar hacked
ALTSBIT - Lost 6.929 BTC, and 23.210 ETH: Lulzsec took credit
CASHAA - lost 336 BTC because of a personal laptop that was hacked
Are exchanges getting more secure?
- Decrease in number of incidents since 2019 (4 in 2020, vs 11 in 2019)
- Decrease in the monetary damage ($4M in 2020 vs $175M in 2019)
Incident causes could have been avoided
- BlockFi SIM Swapping, Cashaa unmanaged personal laptop for work
Attackers are getting creative and going after more than just a hotwallet
- PII on Sunday, SIM Swap Monday
Bitcoin Gold
- Two 51% attacks with 29 block reorg (7167 BTG double spend)
- Attempted 51% with a massive 1300 block reorg. Notified by NiceHash miner. Issued secret node with a checkpoint
- In the second attack, NiceHash put out a software update that had the checkpoint
Ethereum Classic (Aug 1, 2020)
- 51% attack resulting in a massive 3500 block reorg, attacker spent 200k on NiceHash to double spend an exchange.
- PoW coins with easily rentable GPU hashpower will continue getting 51% attacked.
- Bitcoin Gold working with miners to secretly deploy a checkpoint is a new pattern
- Overall we're seeeing a shift to a proof of stake consensus algorithm
- Proof Of Stake is where you lock up coins (staking) to give you voting power for on-chain actions. Performing these actions, or leaving coins "locked up" provides a benefit such as being awarded currency in exchange for staking.
- Delegated Proof Of Stake (DPoS) - you delegate a set of validators, and then entrust them to vote & produce a set of blocks
- Tron and a number of exchanges colluded to get a controlling stake in the SteemIt blockchain. First of a kind DPoS attack
- Once exchanges got a majority stake of delegated power, they were able to vote in a controlling set of validators.
- With being able to set who the validators were, they effectively had full control over the protocol's consensus rules.
- Then they pushed an updated node software that unfroze funds that were from the initial pre-mine, which gave tron the controlling asset in the system. They used this to be able to control the protocol indefinitely
Need to learn about this!!!
March 9 2020
- Solana testnet node failed to validate transaction signatures. 500M SOL were stolen
- DoS vulnerability when parsing invalid blocks
- Resulted in a network halt
- Inflation bug discovered and exploited on testnet. 9B FIL minted.
- Incorrect credidation
- Monero wallet was incorrectly parsing specially crafted coinbase transactions.
- May result in invalid deposits displyed
- Vuln Disclosed which coul dlead to channel partner losing BTC
- Wallet takeover vuln was patched after responsibility disclosed by OpenZeppelin
- Flaw was in the wallet's functionality which allowed for wallet recovery via Guardian nodes
- When Guardian nodes were not well defined, anyone could take over those wallets
- Wallet backdorred through a 3rd party dependency to steal funds (via key disclosure)
- Inflation bug emergency patch. Bug was maliciously introduced. 300M RVN minted and sold on exchanges
- Margin trading bug exploited resulting in ~1M$ worth of ETH theft.
- Flash loans were used to amplify the attack
What's a flash loan?
- Basically a loan where you can borrow an asset and return it back to the initial point all within the same transaction
- Fees are very low or non-existent for a flash loan (due to limited time of loan), and you can have a huge amout of assets available to you
- This breaks the assumption that if an attack is expensive enough to exploit, it's safe...
- In the event that the transaction reverts, it's no big deal because the attacker can just return the funds
- $500k worth of tokens drained from multi-token pools. Bug with deflationary tokens exploited using flash loans.
- Devs didn't predict that deflationary tokens to change the logic to the attackers advantage...
- Dismissed a bug bounty
What's a deflationary token?
- Some cryptocurrencies have an unlimited supply of tokens, making them inflactionary, while others have a fixed number of coins in circulation, making them deflationary
- Developers attacked their own coin to secure user funds. Arbitrage bots claimed some bounty for themselves
- Complex interactions between DeFi components introduce new bugs
What is arbitrage?
- Arbitrage is the simultaneous purchase and sale of the same asset in different markets in order to profit from tiny differences in the asset's listed price.
- This exploits market inefficiencies, ie... short-lived variations in the price of identical or similar financial instruments in different markets or in different forms
- DockerHub - Multiple backdoored docker images uploaded to DockerHub with Monero Miners
- Super Computers - Five in EU hacked using stolen SSH creds to mine Monero
- Lucipher - Windows-based Monero miner
- UCSF gave 116 BTC as ransome
- Canon, many others...
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Twitter Hack - hackers social engineered their way to getting the internal admin tool creds. Then they impersonated celeberities to start a fake btc give-away scan
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MLM - BitConnect - PulseToken? - Wotoken Scam
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Metamask impersonation (getting user to enter info or interact with part of the page which they THINK is metamask)
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Trust Wallet fake in Google Play store. Harry's epic hack to get users' funds back Harry Crypto-Interception Counter-Attack Delegation:
What is Bit Coin Gold?
- BTG was a hard fork on the original cryptocurrency which took place in Oct 24, 2017
- BTG's stated purpose has been to "Make bitcoin decentralized again"
- Devs believe that by adopting a new Proof of Work based algo for the mining process, BTG would not disproportionally favor mining operatations on specialized equiptment
- Crytpocurrency is listed on 40+ exchanges in 11 national currencies
What is a checkpoint?
- A checkpoint is when block hash values up to a specific point in time are hard-coded into the official bitcoin client.
- The client takes all transactions confirmed up to the checkpoint as irreversible
What is a Hard Fork?
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Link: Blockchain Hard Fork
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A hard fork as it relates to blockchain technology is a radical change to a network's protocol that makes previously invalid blocks and transactions invalid, or vice-versa. A hard fork requires all nodes or users to upgrade to the latest version of the protocol software