BitcoinPool has been getting Hacked and DOS'd fairly successfully and quite constantly for the past 2 months. That's a horrible thing to do to any service provider. But, now it looks like BitcoinPool's owners are thinking about going and hacking other people in response.
So I've been e-mailing admins of the open proxies when they've been used to attack us. Since I started doing that, I've gotten 5 reply's back. Two admins basically said "Sorry, can't help." The other 3 have been very helpful in providing use with either the logs or the IP's of the offenders...who seem to have switched to Tor.
I don't want to start pointing fingers at who this is, because I don't have the records from the ISP of the person doing this to prove it's them, but we know the specific area (city and country) and have been able to figure out who it is by other comments they've posted on the bitcoin forums. Let's just say they have a lot more to loose than our pool does.
So here's the question, do we fight back and target these fuckers for counter attacks or just leave them be?
FairUser said he doesn't want to point fingers because he doesn't have proof, but as has been shown earlier in this thread, he's already pointed fingers at both Slush and Tycho with "evidence" that doesn't even actually point to them (the IP Addresses posted in some of their earlier posts about the hacks do point to Eastern Europe, but not to where Slush is).
So just to recap for everyone.
We openly invited Slush to prove that Pool Hopping makes more bitcoins, and set some basic criteria for him to follow so that everyone could follow along and see if pool hopping really worked. He said it did, I said it didn't and asked him to prove it. He never openly excepted our challenge...
Within days we saw our first major attack on April 4th. This was a SQL injection attack that dumped everything from the database and changed people's wallet IDs. Then a few days later we saw SQL injection again that targeted wallet IDs. Then after that we had someone (the same person that stole the DB) trying to brute force into accounts, because user's didn't change their password when we advised them to. Then about 2 weeks after the first attack, we got a massive DoS from multiple IP's. Then after that someone again tried to brute force into people's accounts, and again succeeded do in doing so due to poor passwords. And last but not least was last night, we're someone was trying to brute force people account passwords through the RPC port (8334) and someone else was DoSing us at the same time. So I'm about at the end of my tolerance to deal with this shit, my patience is virtually gone.
So we believe this to be two attackers. One being slush and friends (more evidence on this later), and one being an unknown party from down under. I got a contact with the cyber crime division of the AFP (Australian Federal Police) and I'm waiting to here back about the IP's I sent him to look at. After I explained that it does in fact involved theft of currancy, he said he'd see what he can do to help us. I've also been sending e-mails to the admins of the IP's of the open HTTP proxies that have been used against us, and some have been very helpful in providing us logs. One of the proxies was from a .gov address, so the admin was very happy to have someone report that a box was mis configured and being abusive on the Internet, and he *might* be able to get me the IP's of the people doing the attack depending on whether they were going to do anything about it themselves. So that's two different government's that *might* be able to help us. Personally I'm not holding my breath expecting answers from them, but one can hope. Next step is we're going to block Tor entirely. Don't get me wrong, I love Tor too, but bitcoin and this forum are pretty anonymous anyway, so the need for Tor isn't needed at all.
So, all in all, it's been a shitty fucking month for this pool in regards to being attacked. Instead of proving what they believe to be true, they fucking hack us. So at this point I'm going to say that slush fucking knows that pool hopping doesn't make you more bitcoins, but hacking does apparently.
And now FairUser is openly accusing Slush without posting any evidence at all. He says that he's been able to figure it out from comments posted on the forums, but I haven't seen a single post from Slush that would indicate that he is hacking/DOSing them.
I'm not trying to defend Slush here. I have no idea what he does or does not actually do. But, if you are going to openly accuse any member of this forum of illegal activities, then provide your proof.
Edit:
Also, FairUser was saying that Pool Hopping doesn't actually work at all, but they put in an anti-pool-hopping measure.... One that works in a conceptually similar way to scoring (making earlier shares in a round worth less) even though they said that they would never do something like that.
We've added in code that will hopefully result in pool hoppers being deterred from leaving rounds early.
Essentially, the way this works is;
If the round duration at the end of the round is greater than 1 hour, each user is looked at to see their 'window of participation', which is the time difference between their first and last submitted shares.
If the time difference between their shares is less than one half of the round duration, their share count will be reduced by 50% and the other half of their shares will be credited to an account setup by the pool operators.
