A Typo in Zerocoin's Source Code helped Hackers Steal ZCoins worth $585,000
Feb 18, 2017
Are you a programmer? If yes, then you would know the actual pain of... "forgetting a semicolon," the hide and seek champion since 1958. Typos annoy everyone. Remember how a hacker's typo stopped the biggest bank heist in the history, saved $1 billion of Bangladesh bank from getting stolen. But this time a typo in the Zerocoin source code costs the company more than $585,000 in losses. Zerocoin cryptocurrency protocol is designed to add true cryptographic anonymity to Zcoin transactions that take full advantage of "Zero-Knowledge proofs" to ensure the complete financial privacy of users. Zcoin announced Friday that " a typographical error on a single additional character " in the Zerocoin source code helped an attacker to steal 370,000 Zerocoin, which is over $585,000 at today's price. "We estimate the attacker has created about 370,000 Zcoins which has been almost completely sold except for about 20,000+ Zcoin and absorbed on
