Hacker Reportedly Moves 2.09 Million EOS tokens Following Blacklist Update Failure

A hacker has reportedly transferred about 2.09 million EOS tokens (or $7.7 million USD) from a hacked account due to a failure on the path of an EOS block producer (BP) to update its blacklist feature.

According to a submission on the EOS Go community on Telegram on Saturday, Feb. 23, a new Active BP (games.eos) did not update the blacklist for EOS mainnet accounts and this allowed the hacker move the EOS tokens from the account which was frozen after it was compromised.

EOS has come under stern criticism due to the power its Arbitration Forum ECAF have over the network, as they are able to block accounts. At one time they froze 27 accounts without recourse to any constitution. As reported, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin called EOS and TRON “centralized piles of trash” referring to the consensus system they operate.

The EOS blockchain operates a Delegated proof of Stake (DPOS) consensus system in which has 21elected block producers approve blocks and make decisions on the network. The network has a feature that allowed all top 21 BPs to blacklist compromise accounts.

In a blog post, EOS42 explained that one BP that failed to update the blacklist manually could compromise the network and allow a bad player override decision of the majority of the block producers.

To avoid such scenario, EOS42 proposed to nullify the keys of blacklisted accounts until the community reaches a decision on how to handle frozen accounts on the network.

EOS42 wrote:

“Nulling keys of blacklisted accounts with eosio.wrap would allow us to stop any loss of funds from blacklisted accounts, and restores the integrity of 15/21 DPOS consensus.”

This it noted is better than allowing a single block producer—which could be compromised—to veto the majority of the network. And since the network rotates the top 21 BPs, there is a chance that one that haven’t updated the blacklist could get in.

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EOS (EOS) Price Watch

At the time of writing, EOS is trading at $3.5 to the dollar which is just about the same value it had yesterday. With a total market cap of $3.17 billion EOS is the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Riccardo Lopp is a writer specializing in Crypto, ethereum and whole blockchain ecosystem. His background is in economics and statistics.

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