A hacker drained three Etheeum wallets of more than $30 millions, in the second largest attack in the (short, but agitated) history of the Ethereum blockchain. I'm sure many of you already know that.
But what you may not know is what happened after the attack was discovered.
Well, once it was obvious that the owners lost controls of their wallets and funds, a team of white hat coders got together and continued the work of the attacker by draining the rest of the vulnerable wallets by a staggering $179 millions amount.
Yes, you read that right. A group of people decided it's better to exploit the hack until it drains completely (until there's no wallet left with that vulnerability), safeguard the funds and then redistribute them to the owners, in different, not vulnerable wallets.
So, the attack was "stopped" not because the vulnerability was fixed (there's no time to fix vulnerabilities like this when 1) you don't own the servers and 2) when the network of servers spreads across the entire world) but because a group of guardians robbed the bank faster than the attacker, secured the money and then redistributed the funds back to the owners.
Please stop for a second and contemplate this. Please. It's important.
The Digital Cowboys
I'm not going into details about the technical part, there's an excellent article on Medium by on this topic, but I will talk a little about the social implications of this situation.
We live exciting times here, in the blockchain universe. In a way, we're in full gold rush. Opportunities are popping at every step, there's a new blockchain, or ICO, or project being launched every week and, most important, there's money to be made. And when there's money, there will obviously be people who want that money to such a degree, they will be willing to break the law in order to get it.
We're in the Wild Wild West era of the blockchain. We are pioneering new territories, building the foundation of the future world. But while we're busy doing this, other are sitting on the side, waiting to reap the benefits and run.
Introducing the digital cowboys. The so called "white hat hackers" who diligently stopped all the trains, asked people to step down because they knew there will be some robbery going on down the line, and then put all the people back in other trains (if we were to re-write this event as a western movie, that's probably how it should go).
The digital cowboys silently, but very effectively, stopped a potential carnage by doing exactly what the attacker did, but with good intentions.
And that gets me to the core point of this article.
There's no difference between what the attacker did, and what the white hat group did. They both hacked wallets. The fundamental difference, though, was the intention.
The attacker's intention was greed, the white hat group's intention was compassion. They truly did it out of compassion, which, by the way, doesn't mean just caressing people on the cheeks, feeling emotional when you see poverty or donating to charity every two years. No, that's real, down to earth compassion: saving other people from harm, when you know the harm will come.
From a philosophical point of view, there's some serious food for thought here. What is actually "bad"? It's hacking people's wallets? Well, the white hat coders did just that? But then they give it back...
In every situation there's more than the eye can see. We're limited beings and, most of the time, we can correctly assess a situation only in hindsight.
And in this situation, the eye just saw a vulnerability in the Parity wallet, but the subsequent unfolding of actions created an extraordinary event, one that will for sure remain in the history of the world like the first robbery out of compassion.
Please, stop for a while and contemplate this. Please. It's important.
image source: Pixabay.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
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