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He mentions the timing of the MtGox announcement being odd. What happened at MtGox was somewhat different. MtGox was submitting transactions that were being rej
by dangero 13y ago
He mentions the timing of the MtGox announcement being odd. What happened at MtGox was somewhat different. MtGox was submitting transactions that were being rejected due to being malformed according to the latest Bitcoin client software. What some users discovered is that they could correct the malformation issues in the MtGox transactions causing them to go through, but they could also change the hash transaction id, so that meant that not only could they make the transfer go through, but they could do so while making MtGox's software believe that it in fact had not gone through since MtGox was using the transaction id hash to verify a transaction.
When a transaction was rejected by the Bitcoin network that MtGox sent, the MtGox software would detect the rejection and immediately re-credit your account for the attempted transfer amount. MtGox also had an api that allowed you to see the exact contents of the transactions that they sent to the Bitcoin network. This meant that what someone could do is just grab the rejected transaction, fix the malformed portion, modify the transaction id hash and resend the transaction, causing it to go through, but MtGox was unaware of the successful transfer and would re-credit the account. The user could then rinse and repeat over and over.
The interesting twist of this is that it means MtGox knows which user accounts were used to steal coins from them since the malformed transaction could be modified to change the transaction id hash, but the receiving bitcoin address could not be modified without invalidating the transaction.
- holychiz 13y agoif MtGox knows the thief's account, what can they do to remedy their losses?
- dangero 13y agoProbably not much it depends on if it's a hacked account or not and then if they do in fact know the identity of the hacker then it becomes a legal thing. They can't do anything to revert the theft. It would be an interesting court battle over bitcoins.