VertCoin Suffers Another 51% Attack In 12 Months: Report

Vertcoin suffers its second 51 percent attack for the year and the latest attack occurred exactly one year since the last one as we reported in the previous altcoin news.

Reports of a 51% attack on the altcoin known as Vertcoin (VTC) has surged the internet in the last hours. The attack supposedly happened on the 1^st of December 2019 at 15:19 UTC, when around 603 blocks were removed from the altcoin’s main blockchain. At the same moment, the perpetrators swapped them with 553 attacker blocks.

We are talking about 5 recorded transactions, according to some reports, that included double-spending, while the hacker managed to ‘earn’ approximately 13825 Vertcoin coins from block rewards, which is $3,211 or about 0.44 Bitcoin. One of the interesting things about the attack is that it happened exactly a year after the previous attack, as reported by DC Forecast in early December 2018.

In early December of 2018, reports started to come out that Vertcoin (VTC) suffered a 51% attack, when the project had 22 deep chain reorganizations, with 15 of them supposedly included double-spending of VTC. After the last’s year attack it was estimated that the perpetrators had stolen around $100,000, with the largest reorganization, went 300 blocks deep, according to  Medium report by mark Nesbitt.

Github user known under the pseudonym metalicjames, who is the lead maintainer of Vertcoin, James Lovejoy, reported that Vertacoin was attacked once again. According to the report, the altcoin stoped using the PoW algorithm after the last attack and switched to Lyra2Rev3. While there was a belief by the developers that the project was safer for them, one of the miners noticed an unusual upswing in hashrate rental prices on November 30^th, 2019.

Since Vertcoin has the most trafficked exchange by volume on Bittrex, the exchange was counseled to close its wallet to the coin since the happening of the incident. The exchange reacted by making the withdrawals impossible as soon as they received proof that Vertcoin suffers its second attack.

The real target of the attack could have been Bittrex, while Lovejoy outlines that the double-spend portion attack was aborted before the exchange disabled their wallet. In other words, PoC sabotage seems like the most convincing explanation for now.