Home
News
A fake smart contract has taken the network offline for more than 24 hours, less than a month after a controversial governance referendum.
Juno (JUNO), a Cosmos-based blockchain, fell offline on Tuesday as a result of a suspected network attack.
No user funds have been lost
According to a retweet from the project’s official Twitter handle, the network is still down as of press time, but no user funds have been lost, and the Juno core development team says a patch is in the works.
According to a Juno core engineer who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the network outage was caused by a malicious smart contract classified as a simple “hello world” software.
Over the course of three days, the suspected attacker sent a string of over 400 transactions to the smart contract in an apparent trial-and-error procedure, eventually arriving at a specific combination of transactions that destroyed the network.
According to the developer, the attacker exploited a blockchain vulnerability that Juno planned to remedy in a few hours following the attack via an upgrade. According to the developer, the vulnerability was publicly revealed because it affected all blockchains that use the CosmWasm smart contract platform.
Who is the attacker?
Members of the Juno community are trying to find out who would have been motivated to carry out the attack for no evident financial advantage, according to Daniel Hwang, protocol manager at Stakefish, which operates a Juno validator.
Token holders, according to Hwang, are pointing fingers at potential perpetrators ranging from competitor blockchains to bagholders on the losing end of last month’s governance vote.
A contentious governance vote in March stripped tokens from a “whale” suspected of manipulating a JUNO airdrop – an unprecedented instance of a decentralized community actively voting to reduce a wallet’s token balance.
According to reports, the JUNO token has a $1 billion market cap and has dropped 7% in the last 24 hours.
ALSO READ: Kraken Took A Move Before The Fog Gets Bad: Shuts Down Headquarters in San Francisco
Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while pursuing his post-graduation major in blockchain development. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing, along with coding. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing skills, and a reliable craft at explaining the concepts such as blockchain programming, languages and token minting. He also frequently shares technical details and performance indicators of ICOs and IDOs.
