The members of the Ethereum Foundation have launched a white hat attack on the DAO network aiming to recover the funds stolen by an anonymous hacker.
Last week, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) has suffered a huge hacker attack, which resulted in a theft of more than 3.5 million of ether. The hackers had reportedly exploited the vulnerability in the DAO software.
This week, the DAO received several new attacks, which appeared to be launched by the curators and members of the Ethereum Foundation. On Tuesday, Alex Van de Sande, the lead designer of the foundation, revealed via Twitter that the Ethereum developers were behind the white hat counter attack.
DAO IS BEING SECURELY DRAINED. DO NOT PANIC.
— Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) (@avsa) June 21, 2016
The move was taken in an attempt to save the funds remaining in the DAO network. The developers are aiming at returning the funds that were invested in the organization. In May, DAO has raised more than $150 million in ether, what is considered the biggest crowdfunding event in history.
In the first few hours since the launch of the attack, Ethereum main developers managed to get back more than 7 million of the digital currency, what is about $89 million. To secure the money and hide information on the initiative from the hacker, the attack was carried out in complete secrecy.
Alex Van de Sande noted that more information on the attack will be revealed soon.
Christoph Jentzsch, the co-founder Slock.it, the Germany-based startup that created the DAO, has posted a message, apologizing for not finding a bug in the DAO framework.
“I can honestly say, that I gave my best, open sourced the code and approached as many knowledgeable persons that I could find to review it, but it was not enough. We have learned a lot through this, and are paying a high price. We are dedicated to do all that is in our power to assist the DAO to recover the funds,” he said.
The community members are still deciding on how to fix the problem. There have been several solutions proposed, including spamming the network
Slock.it’s co-founder, Stephan Tual, proposed miners to do a rollback of the Ethereum blockchain, what will delete all transactions happened before the hack.
However, some consider the rollback will undermine ether, which was designed as a decentralized cryptocurrency without central authority.
“You need to compare this to a central server of a bank, where they can just change numbers without anyone being aware,” Tual said. “In this case, it’s completely different. If all the miners come together and [do a rollback], it’s a community action. And it’s transparent, completely transparent.”
The hack had negatively affected Ethereum, with some people losing trust in the network. According to Syenereo’s CEO, Dor Konforty, the human factor should be considered when analyzing the reasons of the attack. The DAO’s smart contract technology, which was recently upgraded to DAO 2.0, is in the early stages and a lot of education needs to be done.
“If The DAO had used proper smart contract technology – such as the one provided by Synereo – the recent attack could have been prevented,” he said.
Moreover, Konforty is convinced the rollback should not be performed, as it is crucial the trust in the decentralization community.
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