Dash Rolls Out Network Upgrade Amid Suspected Attack

by Arnab Shome
  • The mempool of the network spiked to 46 MB on August 7.
Dash Rolls Out Network Upgrade Amid Suspected Attack
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The developers of the cryptocurrency Dash have released an upgrade to its network amid security concerns over transactions spike on its mainnet.

Announced on Friday, Dash Core v0.14.0.3 will upgrade the security of the wallet and P2P client for the cryptocurrency.

“Last week there was an abnormally high network load on the Dash network consisting of around a million 1 input 1 output transactions with a fee just higher than 1 duff per byte,” the company noted in its official blog.

The developers of the project are suspecting that the digital currency network was either hit with an external stress test or an attack.

“After contacting all likely community members who could have executed this and finding that none of them were involved, it appears that the artificial load on the Dash network was either a stress test by someone outside of the Dash developer community or was an attempted attack,” the announcement noted.

According to Dash, the incident resulted in the spike of the mempool of the network to 17 MB and 46 MB respectively, which took hours to clear. Moreover, the developers also found that some mempools were not being emptied, 1 MB caps on some blocks, masternode crashes, and masternodes banning other masternodes and delayed the listing of transactions on some blocks.

Fixes and improvements

In the new update, the developers addressed the issues by improving ‘database space usage,’ and including ‘DKG and LLMQ signing failures’ fixes and ‘signed binaries for Windows,’ along with some other features.

The team ‘strongly recommended’ the masternodes to upgrade to the new version.

With the boom in crypto prices, attacks on Blockchain and even crypto-jacking have increased substantially. Finance Magnates yesterday reported that a newly found crypto-jacking malware is mining Monero on victims' computers and hiding itself from getting detected.

Meanwhile, Dash is one of the eight Cryptocurrencies Coinbase is considering to list on its crypto exchange for trading.

The developers of the cryptocurrency Dash have released an upgrade to its network amid security concerns over transactions spike on its mainnet.

Announced on Friday, Dash Core v0.14.0.3 will upgrade the security of the wallet and P2P client for the cryptocurrency.

“Last week there was an abnormally high network load on the Dash network consisting of around a million 1 input 1 output transactions with a fee just higher than 1 duff per byte,” the company noted in its official blog.

The developers of the project are suspecting that the digital currency network was either hit with an external stress test or an attack.

“After contacting all likely community members who could have executed this and finding that none of them were involved, it appears that the artificial load on the Dash network was either a stress test by someone outside of the Dash developer community or was an attempted attack,” the announcement noted.

According to Dash, the incident resulted in the spike of the mempool of the network to 17 MB and 46 MB respectively, which took hours to clear. Moreover, the developers also found that some mempools were not being emptied, 1 MB caps on some blocks, masternode crashes, and masternodes banning other masternodes and delayed the listing of transactions on some blocks.

Fixes and improvements

In the new update, the developers addressed the issues by improving ‘database space usage,’ and including ‘DKG and LLMQ signing failures’ fixes and ‘signed binaries for Windows,’ along with some other features.

The team ‘strongly recommended’ the masternodes to upgrade to the new version.

With the boom in crypto prices, attacks on Blockchain and even crypto-jacking have increased substantially. Finance Magnates yesterday reported that a newly found crypto-jacking malware is mining Monero on victims' computers and hiding itself from getting detected.

Meanwhile, Dash is one of the eight Cryptocurrencies Coinbase is considering to list on its crypto exchange for trading.

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