INDODAX

DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS

"Indodax is Indonesia’s largest crypto asset marketplace, the perfect place to trade your crypto assets. With 4,606,047 verified members, you can trade your crypto assets, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and many more, hasslefree! Fast, secure, and easy. Join now and secure your profit by trading on Indodax!" "Every transaction is protected with Multi-factor Authentication, combining email verification and Google Authenticator SMS to guarantee that your transaction is truly signed and validated only by you."

"Anonymous cryptocurrency Firo — formerly known as Zcoin— is the latest Proof-of-Work coin to suffer a 51% attack." "Firo (FIRO), formerly known as Zcoin, is a cryptocurrency that focuses on being private digital cash. It created the Lelantus privacy protocol which allows users to burn their coins and redeem them later for brand new ones that do not have any transaction history."

"Prior to Lelantus, it was also the first cryptocurrency to code and launch a practical implementation of the Zerocoin protocol which became one of the most prevalent privacy protocols in use, prior to it being replaced by Sigma and then Lelantus after cryptographic flaws were discovered in the Zerocoin protocol in 2019."

"The founder of Firo (then Zcoin) is Poramin Insom. He earned a masters degree in Information Security from Johns Hopkins University where he wrote a paper on a proposed practical implementation of the Zerocoin protocol. Aside from Firo, he is also a co-founder of the Satang Corporation and has served as second lieutenant with the Royal Thai Armed Forces in its cyber warfare division."

"Reuben Yap joined the project shortly after its launch in 2016 and now leads the project in its overall strategy, development and research goals. Reuben has been a vocal advocate of online and financial privacy, having founded one of Southeast Asia’s earliest VPN services to combat censorship and is a well-respected speaker on the topic, with featured commentary in CoinDesk, BBC, Forbes, Nasdaq, Reuters and Cheddar News, among others. He assumed the role of Project Steward & Co-Founder in November 2019."

"Tweeting on Wednesday, Firo revealed that the protocol had come under a 51% attack and advised holders to pause all transactions until the network returns to a normal state." "The attack was done at a time where most of our team was asleep and we were first made aware at 6:50 AM UTC+8."

"We are under 51% attack at the moment. We recommend not to make transactions during this time until the network returns to a normal state. We will post updates when we have them. Note this is not a coding error but a nature of PoW. $XZC $FIRO"

"XZC(FIRO) 51% attack, 306 blocks rolled back, to 2021-01-18 17:24:20(UTC). Another messy situations."

"The attacker deposited a huge number of coins into Binance, sold them for other coins (most likely BTC, ETH and USDT) and withdrew the proceeds to a personal wallet. This was done with 3 unique KYCed IDs in batches of 10,000 FIRO to 40,000 FIRO totaling 865,951.9714 FIRO."

"Through his own pool, the attacker then revealed his secret mined chain which had more accumulated work on it. This chain rolled back over 300 blocks which also reversed his deposits (and other users’ deposits) into Binance. This meant that the FIRO that were sold on Binance were no longer on Binance and had reverted to the attacker despite him already selling them and withdrawing his BTC/USDT/ETH proceeds."

"The team moved swiftly and put out several emergency updates. The first of which freezes the attacker’s funds so they can’t be moved and also implemented a max re-org depth of 5, and the second will activate chainlocks within a week (at time of writing). The Firo development team is confident in our work, and hope that this activation will be successful and prevent any further attacks similar to this one."

“Exchanges are the ones at a loss as the attacker had deposited funds which have now been reversed because of the 51% attack. We are still working with exchanges to resolve the matter. From what we know at the moment both Binance and Indodax were affected.”

"Attacker consolidated all his FIRO in one address 54 totalling 867,652 FIRO which includes his coinbase rewards he earned from mining the chain. The attacker did not take any steps to anonymize or spread out his funds."

"We are working with exchanges and pools currently. Chainlocks that would have prevented this were being tested on testnet and was weeks away from deployment."

"Indodax has reported losses of 82,741.37718628 FIRO. We are unsure if these are knock on effects of legitimate users withdrawing from Binance to Indodax which are now subsequently reversed. It is possible that once Binance is made whole, Indodax losses would be made good as well."

"v14.3.0 hotfix wallet has been released. Please upgrade all Wallets and Masternodes as soon as possible." "LLMQ chainlocks are being activated soon! Please update to our latest wallet release v.14.4.0 as soon as possible!"

"We have published a post mortem of the 51% attack on Firo and are also asking for users to weigh in on what should be done moving forward. Please let your voice be heard!"

Indodax is a leading cryptocurrency exchange in Indonesia, and Firo is a privacy-based Proof-of-Work blockchain. The Firo blockchain was weeks away from launching a chainlock feature when they were 51% attacked. The attacker attempted to double-spend coins through Binance.

As a result of the attack, the Firo team released an update which locked the attacker's address, and after a community vote, underwent a hard fork upgrade to return funds to affected exchange platforms. Therefore, there were no losses in the end.

HOW COULD THIS HAVE BEEN PREVENTED?

51% attacks can be prevented through a mix of increased block confirmation times and setting checkpoints to prevent large-scale reorganizations. This means the exchange will not credit newly deposited funds, and nodes will be prevented from accepting attacking chains.

Check Our Framework For Safe Secure Exchange Platforms

Privacy-focused Firo cryptocurrency suffers 51% attack (Oct 2)
Home | Firo - Financial Privacy Renewed (Oct 18)
Privacy-Centric Cryptocurrency Firo Suffers 51% Attack on Its Network – Altcoins Bitcoin News (Oct 18)
https://www.binance.com/en/support/announcement/4a06d6ab6abb4f08b12bb93d6fec30ec (Nov 13)
@Altcoinbuzznews Twitter (Nov 13)
@firoorg Twitter (Nov 13)
@cz_binance Twitter (Nov 13)
Firo Community Meeting #2 - 23rd January 2021 - YouTube (Nov 13)
Binance - Wikipedia (Nov 9)
https://www.binance.com/en (Nov 13)
Release v0.14.3.0 · firoorg/firo · GitHub (Nov 13)
Firo 51% attack post mortem and vote on attackers' funds - General - The Firo Forum (Nov 13)
Buy And Sell Bitcoin Indonesia With The Best Bitcoin Price on Indodax (Nov 13)

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