Yes! There are more then
34,200 vulnerable Ethereum smart contracts that have been identified by
research from National University of Singapore (NUS). What does this means? There is a high chance attackers can exploit these vulnerabilities and go on to
steel or freeze the Ether or any other assets associated with the smart contract.
What is a smart contract?
A
smart contract is a
computer protocol which is intended to digitally facilitate, verify or even enforce the negotiation or performance compliance of a contract between two parties.
To put simply
smart contracts are a piece of code that helps you exchange money, property or anything of values in a transparent way without a middle man.
Smart contracts not only defines the rules and penalties around an agreement but also enforce those obligations as well.
Like any piece of computer code smart contracts are also vulnerable. Back in 2016 a hacker exploited a bug in the smart contracts and
stole over $50 million Ether from TheDAO organisation. More recently around November of last year a GitHub user
"Devops199" froze over $285 million Ether inside Parity wallets using one bug he found.
These events triggered a team of researchers from NUS to create a tool to scan
Ethereum smart contracts in 2016, they named it "
Oyente".
Oyente analyzed 19,366
Ethereum smart contracts and discovered that 8,833 of them were vulnerable. But the team's warning about the vulnerabilities of the smart contracts were sadly not taken with the importance it deserved.
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After the Parity wallet freezing by "Devops199" led the team to come up with a new scanning tool which was better at-scale scanning and they named it "
Maian".
Maian has scanned over a million
Ethereum smart contracts and has identified
3.5% of them are vulnerable. The team has warned the users of the potential dangers of the smart contracts and have urged the users to analyze the smart contracts for flaws before they go on to put their funds into the
smart contracts.
We at
Break D Hack also advice the community to have a detailed look at all the
smart contracts and then go on to transfer their assets into the
smart contract.