Business Insider: One of these organisations is the DAO, the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, which controls tens of millions of dollars' worth of the digital currency. ( The bitcoin news site CoinDesk has a good feature explaining more about how the DAO operates .) The DAO is sitting on 7.9 million units, known as ether, of the currency worth $132.7 million .
Early Friday morning, it appears to have been hit with a devastating attack, with unidentified attackers appearing to exploit a software vulnerability and draining drain millions of ether - with a theoretical value in the tens of millions of dollars.
One ether wallet identified by community members as a recipient of the apparently stolen funds holds more than 3.5 million ether. At an exchange rate of about $14 a unit, that works out at $47 million. At $21.50, the value of ether before the hack, it's significantly more - $79.6 million.
The hacker acquired a valid key, how?
If this is Smart card, there are two ways,; break open the key generator at the fab, and hack that; or reverse engineer a high rated smart card chip. But under SmrtCard rules, card allowing high transaction values are strictly limited and protected, often carried into and out of the bank safe at night, under armed guard.
And reverse engineering the chip to find the key means isolating the 95% of the digital gates that are masking noise, long and arduous task. So, like cash, SmartCards are more extremely counterfeit proof, the larger the transactions. It all works if there is a human tamper proof key masking and encryption. Add to the protected software that does honest accounting, and you have pure cash. SmatCards that run banks, they need the same security as a million dollars in cash bags, it is justmthey are smaller. Cards that transact for banks are about a shoebox, when security is added. But, make no mistake,when done right, from fab to pocket the SmartCard should be as secure as gold.
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