The “Coinbase” platform for storing and trading cryptocurrencies was released the day before yesterday her own report About the recent 51% attack on Ethereum Classic.

The hacker successfully managed to perform a 51% attack on Ethereum Classic and steal a total of $9 million.

Previously, we covered in an article about how hackers managed to steal $5.6 million from the OKEx platform:

How did the Ethereum Classic hacker steal $5.6 million from the OKEx platform?

But Coinbase managed to protect its money and the money of its users and explained in its latest report how it did so.

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Like we mentioned earlier on the Bitcoin Arab website, two separate attacks of 51% were organized against the Ethereum blockchain that relies on the Ethereum Mechanism of Action.

The attacker sent millions of ETC to exchanges OKEx and Bitfinex, then exchanged ETC for other currencies and withdrawn them from these exchanges.

Using the hash power of over 51% of all other miners combined, the hacker then scanned the transactions that send ETC to the exchanges, allowing him to keep both the assets he intends to exchange on the exchanges and the two other coins that remain in his wallet.

How did Coinbase detect and prevent the attack?

Coinbase notes in its analysis that the Ethereum Classic blockchain is forked into two different chains based on how different ETC node software clients analyze the blockchain data.

Some of these client nodes run in an abstract state, where blocks beyond a certain lifetime are considered obsolete, and therefore not stored within the node, as a way to reduce memory requirements.

But in this case, the 51% attack attempted to replace blocks that were already considered obsolete.

This caused parity nodes to remain trimmed with the original blockchain data, while nodes were accepted by operators running different clients.

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Coinbase is responsible for dozens of different crypto assets for tens of millions of customers, and also manages a variety of different nodes for many blockchains.

This practice helped the company realize that something was off early on and allowed it to investigate the source of the malfunction.

This also helped avoid the attack, as according to the Coinbase report:

Coinbase has chosen to significantly increase the confirmation number requirement.

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This ensures that double spend transactions are not added to the Coinbase platform.

To avoid a long-term split of the Ethereum Classic blockchain, Coinbase and other tokenized parity node operators have resynchronized their nodes with the dominant chain containing double-spend transactions.

As a result of the attacks, Ethereum Classic Labs hired blockchain tracking firm CipherTrace and law firm “Kobre and Kim” to file criminal charges against Ethereum Classic hackers and the 51% attackers.

Ethereum Classic Labs also released a network security plan to increase coordination among stakeholders to defend against this type of attack in the future.

Read also:

What is the difference between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic (ETH – ETC)?

What are the reasons for the recent rise of OMG digital currency?