Russian man attacks Bitcoin network with 100 lines of code

Abstract: A Russian man who calls himself Alister Maclin has been attacking the Bitcoin network for the past week. He launched a so-called fake transaction ID attack (or malleability attack ), which is not dangerous and is equivalent to the Bitcoin blockchain server receiving spam, but it will affect the confirmation of transactions and cause some trading platforms to delay Bitcoin withdrawals.

Alister Maclin said in an interview that he spent only a few hours writing a 100- line script that runs on a virtual machine, captures transactions broadcast by the Bitcoin network, and then rebroadcasts the transactions using a slightly different ID .

It caused the time for transaction confirmation to increase from about 10 minutes to several hours. He is not the first person to try to disrupt the Bitcoin network.