[waterlesscloud]

There's also a story here about responsible disclosure.

People are making the case (and I tend to agree) that Gox should have contacted the other exchanges in private to discuss this problem before going public with it.

There's a very good chance this widespread attack is a direct result of Gox's announcement.

[glomph]

So first gox is criticised for blaming an old bug and now they are criticised for irresponsible disclosure. Funny old world.

[kzrdude]

What needed responsible disclosure was the fact that Gox was clueless.

[maxerickson]

It contains multitudes.

[o_nate]

A+

[watty]

It seems the general consensus believes it was MtGox's fault that they didn't handle the protocol correctly. The only way to spin this on MtGox is to blame their protocol problems on BitCoin itself.

[Anderkent]

Right, the main argument for that was 'look, no other exchange is having problems!'. Then someone actually started using the bug against other exchanges, and suddenly other exchanges are having problems. But that's mtgox's fault too!

[shachar]

The attack started prior to the disclosure.

[maaku]

No, someone intentionally or accidentally used gox's poor handling of mutant transactions to extract double-payment from their customer support team. Gox blamed the bitcoin protocol for their own stupidity. Then after the press release, someone started a massive DoS attack against the bitcoin network. What happened to gox over the last couple of months is totally different from what what is going on right now.

[shachar]

No, you are wrong, sir. There are many who are recording all Bitcoin network traffic, myself included. I can see that Gox had all their outbound transactions slightly changed and rebroadcast. After that went public, being now outed and in the open, having nothing to gain from stealth the attacker moved to attacking everyone they could.