Unknown hackers have attempted to launch a second 51% attack on Vertcoin (VTC) only ended up paying for the privilege out of their own pockets.

As Vertcoin'due south pb maintainer James Lovejoy revealed in a report on the attack on Dec. 2, a malicious entity targeted cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex in order to manipulate the Vertcoin blockchain.

Hackers paid at to the lowest degree $440 to attack VTC

Vertcoin forked off from Bitcoin (BTC) in 2022 and experienced a major attack in December last yr, during which hackers stole funds worth $100,000.

This fourth dimension, however, it appears the exploit was much less successful.

"Based on the market place prices during the attack's grooming and the difficulty of the blocks the attacker produced, we guess the assailant spent between 0.five-1 BTC to perform the attack," Lovejoy explained.

Equally a upshot, the hackers appear to have come out with a cyberspace loss of between 0.06 BTC ($440) and 0.56 BTC ($4,100):

"The total value of the block rewards the attack received is 13825 VTC (~0.44 BTC). Given the attack was likely not assisting to perform based solely on block rewards, the motivation for the set on is not certain."

Fighting for scraps

Bittrex is VTC'south chief trading venue. After noticing suspicious activity, Lovejoy requested the substitution halt VTC pairs, which appeared to limit the attack's success.

"Given the reorg was just deeper than 600 blocks (Bittrex'due south confirmation requirement for VTC), information technology is possible that Bittrex was the original target, but the double-spend portion attack was aborted due to Bittrex disabling their wallet before the fork could be released," he added.

VTC/USD has fallen around vii% to $0.23 in the past 24 hours, but the move is broadly insignificant within the context of 2022 highs of $0.61 seen in June.

As Cointelegraph reported, Bitcoin remains much more than allowed to 51% attacks thank you to its provably decentralized structure and unrivaled hash rate.

Equally well-known pundit Andreas Antonopoulos previously noted, with Bitcoin, such an assault would price around $1 billion for a ten-infinitesimal offensive, something which in itself is all simply impossible to reach.