As CCN reported, the little-known Coinrail became the latest cryptocurrency exchange to fall prey to hackers, who are said to have made off with approximately $40 million worth of tokens, a fairly pedestrian figure relative to some of the hacks seen over the years.
Later that day, the bitcoin price began to careen downwards, taking every other major cryptocurrency with it. This led some observers to draw the conclusion that the two events were linked.
Writing in market commentary made available to CCN, Greenspan said that “there is absolutely no reason why this smash and grab job at a local boutique should have sent bitcoin down by $1,000.”
While the bitcoin price did experience a small decline in the immediate aftermath of the report that an exchange had been hacked, Greenspan noted that the bulk of the decline came more than 15 hours later and that the scale of the pullback was entirely disproportionate to both the size of the hack and Coinrail’s significance in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
The bitcoin price declined after the Coinrail hack was first reported (circled), but the major drop occurred more than 15 hours later. | Source: eToro
He argued that the decline was instead a technical correction, as most of it occurred immediately after the bitcoin price broke beneath its long-term trendline and moved closer to two key support levels.
“Though the CoinRail hack may have set us off-track, I don’t think that this will have very significant ramifications in the long run,” he said. “The industry has certainly seen much bigger hacks before and other than a technical price level, this doesn’t change much for the path of the industry over the next five years.”
A group of hackers has stolen over $20 million worth of Ethereum from Ethereum-based apps and mining rigs, Chinese cyber-security firm Qihoo 360 Netlab reported today.
The cause of these thefts is Ethereum software applications that have been configured to expose an RPC [Remote Procedure Call] interface on port 8545.
The purpose of this interface is to provide access to a programmatic API that an approved third-party service or app can query and interact or retrieve data from the original Ethereum-based service —such as a mineror wallet application that users or companies have set up for mining or managing funds.
Because of its role, this RPC interface grants access to some pretty sensitive functions, allowing a third-party app the ability to retrieve private keys, move funds, or retrieve the owner’s personal details.
As such, this interface comes disabled by default in most apps, and is usually accompanied by a warning from the original app’s developers not to turn it on unless properly secured by an access control list (ACL), a firewall, or other authentication systems.
Almost all Ethereum-based software comes with an RPC interface nowadays, and in most cases, even when turned on, they are appropriately configured to listen to requests only via the local interface (127.0.0.1), meaning from apps running on the same machine as the original mining/wallet app that exposes the RPC interface.
Some users don’t like to read the documentation
But across the years, developers have been known to tinker with their Ethereum apps, sometimes without knowing what they are doing.
This isn’t a new issue. Months after its launch, the Ethereum Project sent out an official security advisory to warn that some of the users of the geth Ethereum mining software were running mining rigs with this interface open to remote connections, allowing attackers to steal their funds.
But despite the warning from the official Ethereum devs, users have continued to misconfigure their Ethereum clients across the years, and many have reported losing funds out of the blue, but which were later traced back to exposed RPC interfaces.
