Santo Domingo. Blockchain technology itself is very secure, but it can be exploited by other services or developments that use blockchain.
This according to the company ESE, which explains that in the infinite mint attack, the attackers take advantage of a vulnerability in the protocol that allows them to alter the operation of the blockchain.
This type of malicious activity occurs when an attacker creates (mines) a large number of tokens within a protocol. It then proceeds to dump all the minted tokens on the market causing their price to drop.
Generally, this process is done in a short time, so once the tokens acquire a lower value, they can be acquired by attackers at a price much lower than their real value, that is, the value of the crypto asset before its degradation. .
It can also happen that the attacker tries to exchange the minted tokens for others before the market reacts and takes a large sum of money.
“To understand these types of attacks, it is first important to identify blockchain technology. The tokenization process refers to the representation of a real asset or object as a unique data expression. Tokenizing involves uniquely and immutably transforming each of the properties of an object, in order to have a digital representation of it on the blockchain.
Therefore, a token is an object that represents some value, such as a cryptocurrency, an NFT, works of art, video games, collectible pieces or any other element that can acquire a unique and immutable value in the chain of blocks”, says Camilo. Gutiérrez Amaya, head of the ESET Latin America Research Laboratory.
Blockchain systems, according to ESET, are vulnerable to this type of attack mainly due to security flaws associated with the implementation that allow attackers to exploit bugs and other vulnerabilities in the code.
An example of this is the 2020 attack on Cover Protocol, a platform that offers risk coverage for smart contracts, in which attackers exploited vulnerabilities that allowed them to obtain unauthorized rewards from the protocol.
Through this attack it was possible to generate an exorbitant number of COVER tokens (around 40 trillion), which caused the token price to lose around 97% of its value. The attacker then exchanged them for other crypto assets worth $5 million.
