A group of white hat hackers has been on the counter attack lately trying to stop any further drainage of funds from a computer controlled investment fund.
The computer controlled trust fund, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization or “DAO” in short, was launched back in April this year. They used a non-physical digital currency to create the trust fund. The ‘cryptocurrency’ used was Ether, which most believe is even more complex than the Bitcoin currency.
Just last month the trust fund managed to raise close to $150 million funds after a sale of some of its DAO tokens, something which can be equated to shares in the organization. The computer protocol which enables all of this to take place is the Ethereum blockchain, which can also be used to execute some computer programs.
However, just weeks after the initial sale of the DAO tokens, the group encountered a bug in the computer code which is used to take control of the DAO. The bug was then exploited by hackers, who have been able to drain some of the cryptocurrency from the organization which belongs to the groups members. At the time, the stolen money equated close to $50 million.
As expected, the theft resulted in debates on how best to stop the thieving and also to bring back the stolen money. Luckily for the organization, after the second wave of attack on the system which was discovered this week, a group of white hat hackers comprising mostly of members aligned with the Ethereum development community launched a counterattack of their own in an attempt to secure the remaining funds.
Fortunately enough, they seem to be successful in their bid to secure the funds as they managed to recover about 7.2 million Ether, ($100 million) for the organization.
The news is welcome for the DAO, but it remains to be seen whether the organization will be able to live past this experience. At the moment, the future of the fund is clearly unknown. Alex Van De Sande, a lead designer at the Ethereum Foundation said that he might just be able to write a thriller story based on the events of the last few days.
One day I hope to write up thriller story behind these last few days. But for now, there's this: https://t.co/atjnBXjy5V
— Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) (@avsa) June 21, 2016
There is still hope that they will recover the stolen funds from the attacks which happened in April and Van De Sande wrote in a Reddit update that he was coming for the cyber thieves who had gotten away with the money.
