Yesterday, Parity Multisig Wallet was hacked again:

https://paritytech.io/blog/security-alert.html

“This means that currently no funds can be moved out of the [ANY Parity] multi-sig wallets”

A lot of people/companies/ICOs are using Parity-generated multisig wallets. About $300M is frozen and (probably) lost forever.

Disclaimer: I lost little money (about $1000) but my friends lost about $300K.

Who hacked it?

Some guy with a nickname @devops199 (not a member of the Parity team) and an “empty” github account. His Ethereum address is 0xae7168Deb525862f4FEe37d987A971b385b96952 and he has successfully verified it.

How @devops199 hacked it?

All Parity Multisig wallets use single library at 0x863DF6BFa4469f3ead0bE8f9F2AAE51c91A907b4 Library contract was not initialized properly. That allowed anyone to become its owner and selfdestruct it. @devops199 “accidentally” called initWallet() method to own the library https://etherscan.io/tx/0x05f71e1b2cb4f03e547739db15d080fd30c989eda04d37ce6264c5686e0722c9 @devops199 “accidentally” called kill() method to selfdestruct it https://etherscan.io/tx/0x47f7cff7a5e671884629c93b368cb18f58a993f4b19c2a53a8662e3f1482f690 As a result, ALL Parity multisig wallets became useless. If you had any funds or tokens in the Parity multisig -> they are frozen forever (not yet an official position of Parity or Ethereum team, but mine) and you won’t be able to withdraw anything out of it.

N.B.: There are many other multisig wallets (simple contracts or with DApp frontends) that you can use instead. Just never ever use Parity multisig again.

My position?

1: I came to Parity’s gitter and found that @devops199 was still there…

2: He said that it was “unintentional” and he was “just researching”.

3: I provided a community with this analogy:

“Sorry Ethereum, i just destroyed 1% of your valuation”

I don’t want to blame him.

Neither i want to blame a Parity team (because the bug is made by them). Their money is locked too.

I just can’t believe that this guy called 2 methods “accidentally”. If you walked into the bank that was somehow open, you better call the police.

Conclusion

We should be strong as a community. Democracy is an expensive bitch.

We should first contact the team if we find the vulnerability. Let’s make that a rule!

If someone burns money we should at least investigate that. I just don’t understand why some people from the community supports this kind of behaviour (see screenshots above or go to Parity’s gitter channel). This makes crypto weak.

p.s. I don’t think that hard fork is a solution. I am 100% against the hard fork in this case.

p.p.s. (November 10, 2017 update) Please see this article — https://blog.artoken.io/statement-on-the-parity-multi-sig-wallet-vulnerability-and-the-cappasity-artoken-crowdsale-b3a3fed2d567

Therefore, we tend to think that it was not an accident. We suppose that this was a deliberate hacking. We believe that if the situation is not successfully resolved in the nearest future, contacting law enforcement agencies may be the right next step.

Thank you for reading.

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