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>The term "hacker" depends on your viewpoint. Put another way, a user executed a function on a decentralized smart contract platform that transferred $150 milli
by EthanHeilman 9y ago
>The term "hacker" depends on your viewpoint. Put another way, a user executed a function on a decentralized smart contract platform that transferred $150 million to the possession of the function's caller.
I think if you view the action as criminal or if you view it as just a clever use of the smart contract, the person who did this is a hacker. They understood and controlled the software in a way the designers did not intend.
- apetresc 9y agoMy memory of the event may be confused with another one, but I believe the guy who did this did it accidentally. He was as confused by the result as everyone else - in fact, he froze the account on his own, so that he wouldn't have access to it.
- kbenson 9y agoThat was one of the events, I think. There was another one. Perhaps that's the one being described here. I seem to recall that one had a bunch of whitehats who figured out the bug and rushed to exploit everyone just to prevent the bad actors, and so they could return the funds later.
- dsr_ 9y agoThis all happened less than a year ago and there was a lot of discussion of it, here and elsewhere. We have google and duck-duck-go, not to mention a search bar on most HN pages. Perhaps we could point to facts rather than vague remembrances?
- kbenson 9y agoFeel free to look it up and confirm or deny my recollection. That's more work than I was willing to put into it at the time I wrote that. I don't think there's any problem relating vague recollections as long as they are presented as such and attempt to expand the conversation.
- DennisP 9y agoThat's the recent Parity multisig wallet freeze. So far it doesn't look like there will be a fork for that. The event I described happened in the summer of 2016, and was a fairly sophisticated attack.