Chinese Security Firm SlowMist Calls On Exchanges to Help Locate ETC Attacker

A security firm based out of China named SlowMist has claimed that it can now locate the attacker behind the recent Ethereum Classic chain attacks – and it has asked for help from cryptocurrency exchanges that were attacked to find the attacker.

Apparently, SlowMist had been conducting an analysis of the cryptocurrency Ethereum Classic (ETC), and it published the summary of the analysis on their Medium page on Wednesday, January 9. The post specifies three wallet addresses and four transaction hashes that could have been behind the two-day wide block reorganization (reorg) attacks on the crypto exchanges.

The same information was corroborated by Coinbase, and both the companies have gone on record and confirmed double spends have occurred as a result of block reorgs. SlowMist claimed that seven total transactions had been “rolled back” in the attack and almost 54,200 ETC (approx. $270,000) was double-spent, or essentially stolen.

Affirming that these attacks to have started as early as Saturday 19:58 UTC, the company highlights that similar attacks on the network have now stopped, with the last documented one occurring Tuesday at 4:30 UTC.

SlowMistalsos accepted the fact that the locations have not been confirmed. However, it is confident that finding the location of the attackers would become easier if the exchanges in question worked along with their team. SlowMist confirmed that the exchanges that it was looking to collaborate with are Gate.io, Bitrue and Binance.

However, the company declined to divulge into further detail about exactly how they were trying to locate the attackers, beyond the scope of just using Geography, saying that it is “a secret.”

Both Gate.io and Bitrue have issued public statements on their official Twitter accounts claiming 40,000 ETC and 13,000 ETC in double spends on their respective exchange platforms, which was reported by BTCWires on the day of the attack.

Ethereum Classic developers are working closely with the team over at SlowMist and sources say that the two companies supposedly had a meeting today, discussing the potential step forward from here.

The developers have kept users updated fairly frequently through Twitter throughout the process. However, one Tweet stressed the fact that they will “not reorg the chain or revert the events on the chain under any circumstance.”