Malicious actor who goes by the name Homer J on X, carried out a ‘poisoned’ transaction on Cardano, splitting the chain in two. Unlike other attackers who engage in these illicit activities to access funds, Homer J did this just to challenge himself. No funds were lost during this incident.
Cardano network users experienced some anomalous behavior after a malformed delegation transaction was executed on the Cardano mainnet. The network split into two, with one having the poisoned transaction while the other without it. The transaction “exploited a bug in an underlying software library that was not trapped by validation code,” said the incident report.
New nodes validated the transaction while nodes with the older version of the software failed to pass the transaction, causing a fork in the network. The report said, “The bug allowed an oversized hash in a malformed delegation transaction to pass initial validation checks when it should have been rejected.”
The Founder and CEO of the Cardano Foundation, Charles Hoskinson, stated that this attack was premeditated and well planned. “There was a premeditated attack from a disgruntled SPO [stake pool operator] who spent months in the Fake Fred discord actively looking at ways to harm the brand and reputation of IOG.”
Although Hoskinson stated the attack was well planned and executed, X user, Homer J, who admitted to causing this attack, stated, “it was me who endangered the network with my careless action yesterday evening. It started off as a “let’s see if I can reproduce the bad transaction” personal challenge, and then I was dumb ”.
Homer J wrote that he did not sell or short ADA and had no intentions of gaining financial benefits. Even the incident report states that no funds were lost in the process.
This attack exacerbated the already crashing price of Cardano. On the chart below, ADA is trading inside a descending channel, hitting the upper and lower trendlines alternatively.
Currently, ADA has touched the lower trendline and is bound to rise up towards the upper trendline. The Relative Strength Index (RSI) has entered the oversold territory, and the prices are due for a correction. This strengthens the case for a rebound, and the token will once again rise above the $0.5 level. However, that isn’t it. Once the pattern is complete, the token will break out and reach higher.
