An emotional appeal posted on the dark market’s official forum clearly stated that “We have been hacked” and nearly $2.4 to $2.7 million of Bitcoins have been disappeared.
Bitcoin is often referred to as the digital currency or the cryptocurrency and is explained clearly here.
The Defcon note reads:
I must utter words all too familiar to this scarred community: We have been hacked.
Our initial investigations indicate that a vendor exploited a recently discovered vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol known as ‘transaction malleability’ to repeatedly withdraw coins from our system until it was completely empty.”
Earlier this month, the largest Bitcoin trader Mt. Gox suspended its BTC withdrawals citing alleged bug in fundamental design of Bitcoin. Called as ‘transactional malleability,’ the bug could allow a hacker to trick a wallet into thinking that a payment has not been successful, causing it to resend the payment. This bug has been allegedly used to empty the Silk Road’s escrow account.
Defcon also listed online identities of three supposed Silk Road 2.0 suspects and shared records of their transactions with the administrator seeking assistance from the public to identify the hackers, saying:
Stop at nothing to bring this person to your own definition of justice”.
People have reacted differently to this news. While quite a few do believe that the narrative; there are others who refuse the story outright, their perceptions of the story range from an outside criminal hack to an insider’s job to something entirely different from what has been stated officially. Critics have alleged that the bug could have been easily fixed and so it definitely is an insider’s job.
