Verge, a cryptocurrency that boasts security, anonymity, and privacy as it’s strong points has been hit by another so-called 51% hack.
Same Hack Different Day
Only a day after announcing a new partnership with the medical supplement company DIOXYME to allow customers to pay with its XVG cryptocurrency, Verge has lost an estimated 35 million coins worth $1.7 million in an attack that lasted just a few hours.
This latest attack was recognized and reported on Bitcointalk.org by the same user who goes by the online name ocminer that reported a previous attack in April which exploited the same vulnerability in Verge’s code to mine a large number of blocks and reap the rewards over a short period of time according to TNW.
The April attack dubbed by the company as a “small hash attack” on Twitter is what is known as a 51% attack which wiped out 22% of XVG’s value at the time. Though Verge switches between five different cryptographic algorithms for each new block mined, in both attacks, the hacker found a way to fake the timestamps allowing the majority of the network’s mining power to be captured using far less than normal computing power.
Verge hard forked in response to the last attack but apparently failed to remove the glitch which allowed this second identical hack to happen. For its part, the company has downplayed the hack as a ‘denial of services attack affecting some XVG mining pools’ on Twitter.
Verge has been busy since that first hack creating a crowd sale of tokens worth $3 million as it worked toward signing a partnership with Mindgeek which owns porn giants Pornhub and Brazzers. A move they tried to leverage in order to convince online music provider Spotify to include the privacy based cryptocurrency onto their platform and access to their 70 million subscribers.
Unlucky Streak for Privacy Coin
Still, Verge has traveled a bumpy road starting in March when their Twitter account was hacked and a would-be scammer sent out Tweets to its followers offering double back on any XVG they sent to a fraudulent wallet. The scam netted its perpetrator all of about $7 dollars but that and the two 51% attacks coupled with a persistent rumor that there is another vulnerability in their system which exposes users IP addresses does not bode well for a privacy coin.
A recent listing on Bitfinex hasn’t helped the XVG value much as it has been siding steadily over the month trading today at $.045 down 13.6% in the past 24 hours according to coinmarketcap.com.
Image from Shutterstock