A failed spam attack on the Cardano blockchain has prompted developers to work on a node upgrade to prevent future distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
On June 25, the Cardano network faced a DDoS attack beginning at block 10,487,530.
Raul Antonio, CTO of Fluid Tokens, explained that the attack aimed to trick the Cardano blockchain into charging lower fees for high-value transactions.
Additionally, if the attack had succeeded, the attacker could have stolen staked Cardano tokens from the network.
During the attack, Philip Disarro, founder and CEO of Anastasia Labs, explained: “The idea behind this attack is to take advantage of the fact that the size of reference scripts currently does not impact the transaction fee, but it does impact the work that validators have to do to process the transaction.”
Disarro and other Cardano developers managed to outsmart the attacker, reclaim the stolen ADA tokens, and stop the DDoS attack.
The attacker eventually ceased the DDoS attack and failed to move any stolen funds.
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Disarro commented: “Thanks for the free money moron.
“Truly iconic that the attacker who presumably wanted to damage the ecosystem actually ended up donating to the open-source smart contract development work we do […]”
Disarro mentioned that there were alternative methods to stop the attack, but his approach was the quickest.
He added, “If you rush to deploy something to production without thorough testing and a high-quality, independent audit, you might wind up losing a lot of money to vulnerabilities just like the attacker did.”
Intersect, a member-based organization for the Cardano ecosystem, confirmed the attack and thanked the developer community for their swift action against the DDoS attack.
Despite the attack, the Cardano network was not compromised and continued to function normally.
However, Intersect noted, “The network has experienced a higher load than normal and some stake pool operators (SPOs) have been negatively affected due to an intensification in block height battles.”
Intersect assured that once a solution has been thoroughly tested and deployed, they will share the new node version for SPOs to upgrade to.
The Intersect task force is working to identify and test a solution to further reduce the impact of such spam attacks.
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