Open-Source Club: Monero Dodges Yet Another Attack With Community's Help

XMR has considerably more privacy properties than BTC: Instead of just being a decentralized coin, Monero is designed to be fully anonymous and virtually untraceable.

Being an altcoin that is tailor-made for fully private transactions, Monero eventually became accepted as a form of currency on darknet markets like Alphabay and Oasis.

In an August interview with Bloomberg, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Lilita Infante noted that although privacy-focused currencies are less liquid and more anonymous than BTC, the DEA "Still has ways of tracking" altcoins such as Monero and Zcash.

The privacy-focused nature of Monero also prevents it from being listed on some compliant crypto exchanges.

Importantly, the Monero blockchain 'burns' XMR transactions between identical stealth addresses, seeing them as illegitimate.

The Redditor's theory became widely discussed within the Monero subreddit, and the developers reached out with a public announcement only after fixing the issue.

On Sept. 25, Monero team declared that a private patch was "promptly created and later included in the code" after discovering the potential vulnerability.

In an accompanying blog post, Monero developers argued that this was "clearly not the preferred method" because some parts of the Monero ecosystem were still left out, but there was limited time to eliminate the bug.

Finally, Monero claims that the bug "did not affect the protocol and thus the coin supply was not affected," hence no attackers were quick enough to actually exploit the bug.

It became clear that the attack didn't center around Monero specifically, as the malicious code was reportedly activated on websites such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, GitHub and MyEtherWallet along with Monero XMR web wallet services.