Someone Accidentally Bricked a Crypto Wallet Rendering Millions of Dollars in Ether Frozen
Parity Technologies, the company behind widely used crypto wallet service - Parity, disclosed a critical vulnerability on Tuesday because of which some accounts had all their funds frozen.
The vulnerability impacted the “multi-sig” wallet (Wallets that require multiple verifications to confirm a transaction thereby adding an extra layer of security), which was launched on July 20 as the fix to the July hack (a vulnerability in Parity which led to 150,000 ETH being stolen). However, the new version failed to catch another bug that allows users to rewrite a portion of code that controls internal functionality of the wallet exploiting which, a user can get hold of the wallets that do not belong to them.
How exactly did this happen?
Like every other software, Parity Wallets’ code has some dependencies which were being pulled from a location specified in the code in the form of a library. As reported by the organisation, a user accidentally removed the path to a critical dependency which reflected in the central wallet logic, bricking the entire system and resulting in millions of accounts getting frozen.
According to the reports, at least 600,000 ETH (worth around $150 million) is frozen at the moment and can’t be moved anywhere. However, a Parity spokesperson has confirmed that no Ether has been stolen.
