ZenCash Hit By Double Spend Attack

ZenCash Hit By Double Spend Attack

Next to suffer the wrath of double spend mining attacks is ZenCash, according to reports that have surfaced over this weekend. The ZenCash network has been victim of a 51% attack, where the majority of the network is seized by a lone entity for the purposes of malicious mining. Whilst the problem now seems to have been repaired, this highlights once more, just how risky cryptocurrency investment is.

What has happened here? According to an official statement by ZenCash:

“The ZenCash network was the target of a 51% attack on 2 June at approximately 10:43 pm EDT (03 June 02:43 hrs UTC). The ZenCash team immediately executed mitigation procedures to significantly increase the difficulty of future attacks on the network.”

Moreover:

“It is possible that the attacker has a private mining operation large enough to conduct the attack and/or supplement with rental hash power.  Net hash rate is derived from the last mined block and therefore live hash rate statistics are not available. The suspect pool address is znkMXdwwxvPp9jNoSjukAbBHjCShQ8ZaLib. Between blocks 318165 and 318275, the attacker(s) caused multiple reorganizations of the blockchain, reverting 38 blocks in the longest reorganization. In block 318204 and 318234 the attacker(s) performed double-spend attacks.”

Such attacks can prove to be devastating for cryptocurrencies, however in this case, it does seem as if the damage exerted is somewhat limited. We should however consider that in light of this, another attack is quite likely, such is the nature of cryptocurrencies, there’s nothing we can do about that. As investors, you can alleviate a great deal of risk by storing your assets on a cold storage device. Yes, of course, if you lose the device then you lose your earnings, however, if you look after it and store your wallet safely then, since cold storage devices are offline, you aren’t going to be subject to losing finances within such attacks as what we have seen on the ZenCash network. In this instance though, you are of course subject to a down trend in value that such attacks can cause. At the time of writing, ZenCash is valued at $27.63, down 6.91%. Just last week, ZenCash did peak at $36.88, therefore as you can see, the wake of this attack (and recent market conditions of course) have forced some value out of the currency. Let this serve you as a reminder for just how exposed you can be when investing in cryptocurrency. It is so vital that you practice safe storage of your assets. Risk can only be reduced by yourself therefore, stay alert and keep your assets safe. If you do this, at least you’ll be out of the red when the attackers come. See the full statement by ZenCash regarding this news for yourself, here- https://blog.zencash.com/zencash-statement-on-double-spend-attack/?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=social&utm_content=ann&utm_campaign=double+spend

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