The Ethereum community is reeling after what appears to be another attack on the network. All nodes running the Geth client appear to be affected.
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Geth Nodes Running Out of Memory
Ethereum developer and co-founder Jeffrey Wilcke posted a Security Alert on the official Ethereum blog on 18 September. Geth nodes, he said, were “running out of memory and crashing on block 2283416“.
He advised users to switch to an alternate client until the problem is fixed.
Geth is the the command line interface for running a full Ethereum node implemented in Go. While Geth clients are not a majority on the Ethereum network, their numbers have been “rising rapidly” in the past few months.
Ethernodes.org, which provides node data for the Ethereum network, was also offline at press time.
Enemies and/or DAO Heist Link?
Some speculated the attack was possibly coordinated by Ethereum’s enemies. Today is the first day of Devcon2 in Shanghai, a major Ethereum development conference, so is likely to get attention.
User TeamJinx posted on Reddit that the Ethereum address executing the code disrupting the network is “very likely involved with the DAO heist”.
Others replied the attack could be from a “Bitcoin maximalist”, supporter of Ethereum Classic or an opponent of cryptocurrency in general. So far, however, no proof exists of any motive. The identity and exact motive for exploiting TheDAO code to remove funds in June also remains unclear.
Ethereum’s Reputation
There is no doubt both incidents, including today’s, are affecting Ethereum’s public reputation and could demoralize developers concerned about the network’s integrity.
The price of Ethereum’s native currency ether had been rising, but dropped slightly on the news to just over $12.
Bitcoinist will continue to monitor this developing story and update when more information is available.
Are you a Geth or Ethereum user? Will this latest incident make any difference to Ethereum’s progress?