Reentrancy exploit drains 3.6 million ETH from The DAO, triggering Ethereum’s first contentious hard fork

Description

On June 17, 2016, attackers exploited a recursive‐call vulnerability in The DAO’s smart contract, draining over 3.6 million ETH (≈ $50 million) from the organisation’s funds.

Event date

June 17, 2016

Quotes that support claims

On June 17, 2016, an anonymous hacker exploited a vulnerability in the DAO’s smart contract code, and drained over 3.6 million Ether from the project.

A hacker on Friday siphoned more than $50 million of digital money away from an experimental virtual currency project

An attack has been found and exploited in the DAO, and the attacker is currently in the process of draining the ether contained in the DAO into a child DAO. The attack is a recursive calling vulnerability, where an attacker called the “split” function, and then calls the split function recursively inside of the split, thereby collecting ether many times over in a single transaction.

Tags

Week 25 of 2016