Lisk Coin [LSK] at Risk: Malicious Transaction Attack Sighted on Lisk Blockchain

Blockchains have been at risk of attacks ever since they have existed.  As the popularity of blockchains increased, attacks have been on a high trying to steal assets. The latest to have been hit is Lisk coin (LSK) which was attacked by a malicious transaction. All processes on the Lisk blockchain, the Lisk Core, were halted having been triggered as an automated security measure.

Lisk coin core attacked

The security of Lisk blockchain is in the hands of “101 delegates” elected by the community. The delegates are responsible for creating blocks by verifying transactions.

However, a few days back, a transaction was accepted with a faulty timestamp creating a rare “edge -case scenario” bug, though it gave warnings of being faulty. The transaction, however, wasn’t completed but this brought the blockchain, Lisk Core, to a halt and stop all nodes from processing new blocks.

At the time of the halt, there were around 150 transactions in the process and were not included in the network. The funds involved in these transactions did not show any changes as the transactions were frozen and nullified.

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Lisk coin management responds

As the faulty transaction was noted, Max Kordek, the CEO of Lisk came out with a statement that all the funds in the system were safe and the company was in a process to implement a fix and also to enhance security.

Kordek came out with a statement in public:

“In lieu of our commitment to full transparency, we have had similar edge-cases take place 2 or 3 times in the past. In all scenarios, the Lisk blockchain always remained secure, as intended, through the deployment of new Lisk Core versions which fixed such issues and allowed for the Lisk coin blockchain to continue running as normal.”

The Lisk coin network was also updated and since then have been managing the transactions and is currently bug-free. Lisk coin came out with the following announcement to verify the same

“We’ve released #Lisk Core 0.9.15, which deals with this morning’s issue of a malformed transaction stopping transaction processing and block production. Release notes are available on GitHub: https://t.co/QyN30nKcV4.”

He ended the announcement by requesting delegates to reconstruct their nodes and said that further updates will occur.

Regrettably, for Lisk coin,  the issue has once again highlighted the problem of delegates that have worked a way around to vote themselves into positions without the approvals of a widespread community. This issue was also the reason for the delay in getting the Lisk coin Core up and running as the responses from the delegates were delayed, as they needed to update their nodes. This attack and delayed delegate responses show that the system is yet to be perfected.

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