Hackers Fail Epically After Vertcoin 51% Attempt Costs THEM Money

A second 51% attack on Vertcoin was just attempted earlier today but the hackers (unknown) ended up paying for the attempt out of their own pockets!

Turns out, crime DOES pay… just not in the way they intended...

51% Hacking

The lead maintainer on Vertcoin, James Lovejoy revealed that a malicious person(s) targeted the crypto platform Bittrex. This was in order to try and force a manipulative manner onto the Vertcoin blockchain.

In 2014, the cryptocurrency left Bitcoin in the form of a fork. This led to a major attack in December of last year in which a whopping $100k was stolen by hackers.

But the exploit attempt this year has clearly been a whopping fail instead.

“Based on the market prices during the attack's preparation and the difficulty of the blocks the attacker produced, we estimate the attacker spent between 0.5-1 BTC to perform the attack,” Lovejoy explained. 

The hackers seem to have come out of this whole ordeal $440 worse off. That’s at the very least too, $4.1k is the most they could have reportedly lost.

“The total value of the block rewards the attack received is 13825 VTC (~0.44 BTC). Given the attack was likely not profitable to perform based solely on block rewards, the motivation for the attack is not certain.”

The Rise of Crypto

The rise in the price of cryptocurrencies has been often accompanied by an increase of general interest by big institutional investors. At the end of 2017, we saw a lot more people enter the market who probably never even heard of cryptocurrency and get involved with the space. Just as institutional investors got attracted into the space through the idea of money, hackers and scammers also jumped on the bandwagon...

For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!