The DAO incident continues to heat up, and the attackers counter-invade the Ethereum team's "white hat" contract

The DAO attack incident continues to heat up.

The DAO, the largest crowdfunding project in history, raised more than 160 million US dollars in Ethereum. Currently, these funds have been dispersed into various accounts.

The vexing thing is that the holders of some accounts are unknown.

In order to control funds, the Ethereum development team made a "Robin Hood" move yesterday. Last Friday, the attacker used the split (spilt) function and then recursively split to steal nearly 3.6 million ether. The Ethereum development team also adopted the same method and successfully "sucked" a large amount of ether from the DAO into two new contracts yesterday. It is said that this move is to prevent the DAO's ether from being attacked again.

The good times did not last long. Lefteris Karapetsas, technical director of the DAO development team Slock.it, said that the DAO attacker used the same vulnerability in the smart contract to attack the Ethereum team's "white hat" contract.

The attacker tried to gain access to child DAOs by investing in the DAO. Karapetsas suggested to fight back against the hacker so that he would not have the opportunity to attack again.

Someone invested in DAO to split the tokens, and currently only 78 tokens have been split. Although the number of tokens he received is not large, he has successfully entered the sub-DAO.

However, the existence of the child DAO is intended to constrain the attacker’s actions, and he will not be able to access the money until the end of next month.

Karapetsas said that we are currently in a buffer period, which provides sufficient time for discussion and implementation of the Ethereum network fork plan.

Slock.it founder and chief operating officer (COO) Stephan Tual said the DAO’s funds had been transferred thanks to the efforts of members of the Ethereum Foundation and the Slock.it team, as well as some other participants.

70% of DAO’s funds are controlled by “white hat hackers”, including the Ethereum Foundation, Slock.it team, etc.

But today's incident tells us that as long as the DAO smart contract loopholes exist, it will inevitably be attacked in the future. No matter how many sub-DAOs are created, these loopholes will still exist. It is for this reason that some people suggest changing the rules of the Ethereum network (i.e. forking).

Supporters say the fork plan would allow developers to temporarily freeze the DAO's funds, keeping them safe until they can be retrieved.

Opponents believe that the fork plan completely violates the decentralized guarantee of the Ethereum blockchain and the entire Ethereum project. Some people also say that the Ethereum development team is eager to fork because of personal interests. They also invested in DAO and of course want to recover their losses as soon as possible.