Spank chain the popular Ethereum based adult entertainment company suffered a major security breach. Hackers planted a bug on the popular platform and stole Ether. By the time the damaged was done the hackers took away with around $38,000. The incident was reported on October 6 on a medium blog post. Spank chain revealed that it was able to detect a day later after the report has come out but the damage was already done.
Here is what we know so far
Anonymous hackers were able to steal around $38,000 or 165.38 Ethereum from the platform’s smart contract payment channel. The breach also caused the immobilization of the company‘s internal token BOOTY worth around $4,000.The immobilized BOOTY and $9,300 stolen ETH belonged to the users of the platform while the rest belonged to the company. However, spank chain promised to repay the stolen Ethereum and the Booty coins and deposit them directly into users account via Ethereum airdrop.
The firm has halted its cam service called spank live. This it argues is to prevent its users from depositing directly into the payment channel’s smart contract until it fixes its security flaws. The company expects to reboot the website in around two or three days to reset the payment channel. Additionally, it hopes to reset the native token distribution, eliminate security weakness and finally carry out airdrop reimbursements.
The attack shared similarities with the hacking bug that exploited and hijacked the Decentralized Autonomous organization (THE DAO). By creating a malicious contract to mimic the ERC20 with a transfer function which called back payment back into the smart channel multiple times in a loop, he was able to extract ethereum each time.
Even though the smart contract is simply difficult to hack, they still have flowed. It is a new technology and can be prone to bugs which hackers can exploit. In a blog post titled “We Got Spanked: What we know so far.”
Spankchain said “Unfortunately, as we were in the middle of investigating other smart contract bugs, we didn’t realize the hack had taken place until 7:00 pm PST Sunday, at which point we took Spank. Live offline.”
The adult entertainment industry and cryptocurrencies
In recent years the Adult entertainment industry has been leaning towards the use of cryptocurrencies. This has been partly fueled by the anonymity provided by the blockchain technology as well as other numerous benefits
