November 7th, 2017

An ethereum newbie learning how to write his first lines of Solidity accidentally destroyed the Parity wallet contract that held the funds of more than a million ether causing more than $300,000,000 of funds to be eternally frozen. Hundreds of individuals who relied on the Parity wallet contract were affected by this.

Parity's Tweet: "To the best of our knowledge the funds are frozen & can't be moved anywhere. The total ETH circulating social media is speculative." - https://twitter.com/ParityTech/status/927887949219487744

Estimated Ethereum Lost: "Over 1 million ether (around $278,359,059 US) is the total impact" - https://twitter.com/paddyucl/status/927885515407454209

Yikes. This is the third major hacking event and security vulnerability found on Ethereum since its release, and there will be more vulnerabilities and security issues found as more users join.

"I accidentally killed it." - Devops199

So exactly what happened? It seems a user named "Devops199" experimenting around with Solidity contracts accidentally found a loophole regarding Parity's Wallet Library contract. The Wallet Library has a function called "Create New Wallet" which is supposed to be run from a new Ethereum wallet. Instead, Devops199 called the function directly on the Wallet Library causing the Wallet Library Contract to turn into itself a wallet and making Devops199 its owner.

Shortly afterwards, being an "Ethereum Newbie", Devops199 proceeded to run the kill() command which renders a wallet useless. Since the Wallet Library contract was now a wallet, and since Devops199 ran the kill() command on it, the Wallet Library contract became useless and all funds that relied on it became frozen.

This is the contract the "Suicide" command was ran on on: https://etherscan.io/address/0x863df6bfa4469f3ead0be8f9f2aae51c91a907b4#code

Over a million ether apparently depended on this contract for its withdrawal and usage. Tokens are affected too. Now that the suicide code was ran, none of the ether or tokens of these wallets can be ever be used again.

All Multi-Sig Wallets that relied on the Parity contract are effectively frozen. Hundreds of individuals are effected by this disastrous event.