GRIN Privacy Coin Suffered 51% Attack, Network Remains Vulnerable

The GRIN privacy coin has just suffered a 51% attack with the network remaining vulnerable to a centralized mining attack. In today’s latest cryptocurrency news, we are reading more on the attack.

According to the Grin community member, the attacker was quite successful in reorganizing new blocks on the network but the platform still remains vulnerable to repeated attacks as unknown mining pools are holding more than half of the network’s hash rate. The GRIN privacy coin experienced a 51% attack which is a type of attack where a single miner acquires more than 50% of mining hash power and takes over the network. Mining pool 2Miners reported the first of the incident.

According to 2Miners, the unknown mining entity acquired about 57% of the hashpower which enabled the entity to execute the attacks. Also, the platform had to stop its operations as it feared more rejection of new blocks. According to the Grin community member, the attacker managed to reorganize new blocks so users can view one of the forked blocks by following an address. The attacker generated the block on November 7 as the Grin community member wrote:

 “Shortly after, it appears the entity successfully created large reorgs in a likely attempt to double spend on an exchange. The success of the attack has not been determined.”

The Grin team notified all exchanges about the situation and they are now working with them to prevent hackers from spending forked coins. 51% attacks swamped many notable PoW blockchains this year. For example, a similar attack happened in September against Ethereum Classic. It is not as expensive to launch a 51% attack against some blockchains, mainly those that have a small number of miners or low hash power. In fact, the cost of launching a 51% attack on Grin for one hour is about $77.

As per the recent GRin news, A Grin developer funded by the Litecoin Foundation recently suggested a solution to fixing the common “Achilles heel of Mimblewimble privacy.” Named David Burkett, the developer at MimbleWimble (MW) privacy coin center Grin, started a thread on the monthly updates and detailed the progress on both Grin’s development and the integration of MW’s privacy-focused technology into Litcoin (LTC). In regards to Grin’s progress, the Grin developer performed the first ever pre-broadcast MW Coinjoin which would allegedly make transactions more private by disabling the broadcasting before transactions joined others in the Coinjoin block.