- Monero developers have fixed nine potentially dangerous vulnerabilities on its network
- The team says the vulnerability could have been exploited by rogue actors to steal crypto from exchanges
- Five denial of service (DoS) attack vectors were also discovered and fixed
Monero (XMR), a privacy-centric cryptocurrency that currently occupies the 14th spot in the top 100 digital assets table, has revealed it has successfully fixed nine bugs in its network that would have allowed hackers to steal XMR from crypto exchanges, according to a report on July 4, 2019.
Nine vulnerabilities in Monero found and fixed
Per sources close to the matter, Monero has revealed that developers fixed nine potentially harmful bugs on its network so far in 2019.
Specifically, the nine vulnerabilities which include the CryptoNote remote node DoS, Remote P2P DoS, Remote Daemon RPC Attack, and several other DoS attack vectors would have been exploited by hackers to wreak huge havoc on the network.
The researchers have also revealed that before the vulnerability was taken care of, rogue Monero miners were hypothetically able to create specially-crafted blocks to force Monero wallets into confirming fake deposits for any amount of XMR specified by the cyberpunks.
Critical vulnerabilities were fortunately never exploited
Notably, the five DoS attack vectors discovered include one with “critical severity.”
The attack vector related to CryptoNote, an application layer that helps Monero to increase the privacy of transactions, could have allowed bad actors to shut down Monero nodes by requesting excessive amounts of blockchain data from the network.
Andrey Sabelnikov, the cybersecurity expert who discovered the bug noted that it is very possible to initiate a protocol request that would call all the blocks from a big blockchain such as Monero from another node. He noted:
“Preparing such a response can take a lot of resources. Eventually, the OS might kill it due to the huge memory consumption.”
The researchers have also revealed that the Monero network was also leaking uninitiated memory and sensitive data to untrusted peers on the network.
According to Hard Fork, since the discovery of the bugs, eight out of the nine vulnerabilities have been completely fixed, with no reported cases of exploitation, while the details concerning one remain undisclosed.
As reported by Blockchain Reporter earlier in March 2019, the network underwent a hugely successful hardfork aimed at improving security and privacy.
At press time, the price of Monero (XMR) sits at $87, with a market cap of $1.5 billion as seen on CoinMarketCap.
