this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
19 points (85.2% liked)
Monero
1662 readers
30 users here now
This is the lemmy community of Monero (XMR), a secure, private, untraceable currency that is open-source and freely available to all.
Wallets
Android (Cake Wallet) / (Monero.com)
iOS (Cake Wallet) / (Monero.com)
Instance tags for discoverability:
Monero, XMR, crypto, cryptocurrency
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They made money through extortion, not by draining any wallets due to spam. There was spam and it did delay transactions for regular users due to existing wallet bugs that are now fixed. I can't really comment on badly coded markets, I assume they somehow broke their payment systems because they didn't account for long delays when receiving coins or also had the fee selection bug.
Official antidarknet admin here.
You seem very certain the attack has been "patched" and we made money from "extortion"? Where are you getting your information from while answering with such certainty? Really curious. I'm not being offensive here but is really not good especially for a website admin to make high speculation when they don't know the facts.
Let me tell you how it really is and then you and everyone else can draw own conclusions.
Fact #1
Although the bug was patched officially it's still possible to do what we described in the post on our forum. Try it out and see for yourself. Automatically setting the fee doesn't make the problem go away if you're 300 blocks or more backlog. As an attacker setting high fees and spamming it DOES create backlog too albeit slower. We do agree it could've been the case of the market wallets not being updated hence not being able to send transactions and falling under our exploit scope. Some of our attacks were after the patch was deployed evident by the timeline of certain darknet marketplaces collapsing.
Fact #2
We never extorted nobody we simply took it from criminals extortion means something else. You say we "extorted" but in the next sentance you say "they somehow broke their payment systems"? You're absolutely correct we did break their payment systems but not because they didn't account for long delays or because we "extorted" them (we never communicated we just did our exploit). But reason being when markets were executing sending payments functions (withdraw for clients) they hadn't accounted for the sending itself to fail due to the huge backlog we were creating with the spam. Creating an account and depositing then withdrawing while spamming Monero network resulted in getting multiple times the same amount over and over. Simple and honestly newbie programmer mistake not to cover use cases that cost them in total 300k+ and lead to several of them shutting down.
Fact #3
Our mission statement is crystal clear. We never took any profit from these attacks. All money were and are being put back into our new projects and operations which are ongoing targetting darknet markets, forums, fraud shops and so on.
We appreciate the discussion and do hope sincerely the monero devs to be notified, do simulation tests on that stressnet that was build specifically due the attack and see what we're talking about is not theory in any way and still possible today with enough resources (not talking crazy amounts here less than 100k).
As a bonus to the developers if you're reading this is the official wallets are extremely unstable at 200,000 subaccounts if each has had at least one transaction in and one out. Try generating more subaccounts after 200k it takes many times longer to generate rather than when first initializing a wallet. The more accounts you add the slower it gets. Should probably fix that too. Don't take our word for it but test it yourselves.
We fight the illegal use and not against privacy featured coins like Monero that's why we're sharing all of it. We did indeed use it and possibly cost inconvenience to users however taking down illegal markets where hardcore substances are sold is a priority over making a payment now rather than in half a day.
Antinet, AntiDarkNet admin
Yeah sorry, I had not considered draining market wallets as an option. Thanks for the pentest, it greatly pushed FCMPs and high-throughput research forward!
Good to hear we never intended to hurt any legitimate Monero users. That has been said so many times already even on our latest clarification topic (for the thickest of users) https://antidark.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=15 hope you don't mind posting this link twice. We very much like this site better than Reddit.