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posted by takyon on Wednesday November 15 2017, @02:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the vanishing-act dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

A crypto-currency collector who was locked out of his $1m Ethereum multi-signature wallet this week by a catastrophic bug in Parity's software has claimed the blunder was not an accident – it was "deliberate and fraudulent."

On Tuesday, Parity confessed all of its multi-signature Ethereum wallets – which each require multiple people to sign-off transactions – created since July 20 were "accidentally" frozen, quite possibly permanently locking folks out of their cyber-cash collections. The digital money stores contained an estimated $280m of Ethereum; 1 ETH coin is worth about $304 right now. The wallet developer blamed a single user who, apparently, inadvertently triggered a software flaw that brought the shutters down on roughly 70 crypto-purses worldwide.

[...] Cappasity has alleged the wallet freeze was no accident: someone deliberately triggered the mass lock down, we're told, and there's evidence to prove it. By studying devops199's attempts to extract and change ownership of ARToken's and Polkadot's smart contracts, it appears the user was maliciously poking around, eventually triggering the catastrophic bug in Parity's software. "Our internal investigation has demonstrated that the actions on the part of devops199 were deliberate," said Cappasity's founder Kosta Popov in a statement this week.

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/10/parity_280m_ethereum_wallet_lockdown_hack/

Ethereum.

Previously: $300m in Cryptocurrency Accidentally Lost Forever Due to Bug


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Fluffeh on Wednesday November 15 2017, @02:28AM (6 children)

    by Fluffeh (954) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 15 2017, @02:28AM (#597105) Journal

    If this is just a flaw, a bug, a whoopsie-daisy in crypto world, it's pretty hard to sue someone and get a jury to agree that you should be paid damages. On the other hand, if someone is poking about all cloak-and-dagger then the law might look more generously to the damaged party.

    Of course they will be claiming to high heaven that someone was trying to do wrong.

    Of course, they might be right. Parity got the first salvo of comms out though - so sort of set the message on this one.

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  • (Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday November 15 2017, @04:36AM (1 child)

    by captain normal (2205) on Wednesday November 15 2017, @04:36AM (#597152)

    Depends on whether the damaged party got a message that said, "All your cyber-coin now belong us."

    --
    When life isn't going right, go left.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @06:25AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @06:25AM (#597177)

    On the other hand, if someone is poking about all cloak-and-dagger then the law might look more generously to the damaged party.

    Depends. If the person was poking around to see if _his_ wallet was safe and then triggered the problem then I'd say it's not his fault.

    After all if someone sells you something they claim to be secure and you poke around to see if it's as secure as they claim and it breaks catastrophically then I'd be inclined to consider the seller a huge fraudster.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @02:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @02:47PM (#597288)

      DMCA disagrees with you

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Wednesday November 15 2017, @06:52PM (1 child)

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday November 15 2017, @06:52PM (#597404)

    Sure, go ahead and sue in the courts that have jurisdiction over your transactions in government-free decentralized cryptocurrency.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:10AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:10AM (#597611)

      You mean East Texas, right?