Security experts and researchers at Qihoo 360 Netlab, a Chinese cyber-protection company have cautioned against the increasing instances of hackers targeting insecure Ethereum clients. According to a report in The Hacker News, researchers had in March warned about a theft of around 4 ETH by a bunch of cybercriminals who were surfing through the internet to catch insecure Ethereum nodes.
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But the company has now noted that the scale of the theft had become much larger- amounting to around $20 million at the time of writing. The nodes that were attacked were running the Geth client. Geth is a widely used client for running Ethereum and allowing JSON-RPC interface on it permits users to access the Ethereum block-chain and also makes possible transactions from any type of account which has been unlocked.
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The company had notified in March that the hackers were on a lookout for internet users who had left their JSON-RPC port 8545 unsecured to anybody on the internet. The Hacker News report quoted an advisory given out by the Ethereum Project three years ago which cautioned users that leaving the JSON-RPC interface on an internet-connected machine without a firewall policy leaves one’s cryptocurrency wallet vulnerable to theft to not just hackers, but to anybody who is aware of the wallet address along with their system’s IP address.
Digital currencies such as Ethereum have garnered much interest for investors because these block-chain transactions by which they operate are anonymous. However, in terms of security of transactions, the users in the cryptocurrency market remain most susceptible to hacking.
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