A hack on Silk Road 2.0 has been blamed on a bitcoin bug.
The newly created, Silk Road 2.0 has been hacked by one of it’s sellers and all of the bitcoins have been stolen.
The hacker collected all bitcoins belonging to both users and the site and the admin of the site, “Defcon” blamed the sites “transaction malleability” for the attack.
“I am sweating as I write this… I must utter words all too familiar to this scarred community: We have been hacked,” Defcon wrote. “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.”
It is still unclear how many Bitcoins were stolen although it has been speculated that more than $36.1 million in bitcoins were taken which would equate to roughly 58,8000 coins. Other analysts believe however that the attack was much smaller with only $2.6 million stolen.
Based on current evidence, the hackers have been pinpointed to two people in Australia or one person in France.
Defcon also announced that he would “stop at nothing” to bring this person to justice.
Despite the pleas from Defcon, many of the sites users are fuming and feel that perhaps the site staff were responsible for the hack themselves, or at least knew the hack was going to take place.
“Something’s not correct: The bug…can’t be made responsible if bitcoins are missing now!” writes a user named pathfinder.
“Oh, this is rich. How many users called for the shutdown of SR2 to fix the problems? They were ignored,” writes a user named aqualung on the site’s forums. “Admins did this. Not some vendor.”
Defcon denied the allegations however and took full responsibility for the breach in the software. “I have failed you as a leader, and am completely devastated by today’s discoveries…It is a crushing blow. I cannot find the words to express how deeply I want this movement to be safe from the very threats I just watched materialize during my watch.”
Since the shut down of the original Silk Road, the new site has been plagued with difficulties, hacks and scams. There were other sites that attempted to follow in Silk Roads footsteps too however more than 50 percent of these sites have been hacked or admin has run off with users bitcoins.
Despite the unstableness, Silk Road 2.0 still remains one of the most stable and popular marketplaces for all things illegal. To date, the site currently has 13,000 products for sale.