Bitcoin Protocol and Consensus Rules Intact as Hashrate of About 64,000 Miners Redirected

Odaily News: According to OCEAN monitoring, about 64,000 Bitcoin miners were taken over and roughly 13 EH/s of hashrate was redirected to the OCEAN mining pool, with the incident beginning at about 8 p.m. Central Time that evening. OCEAN reported that its hashrate briefly rose to about 50 EH/s before stabilizing at about 40 EH/s; the redirected hashrate later fell to about 100 PH/s, and most affected miners were pulled back or went offline within a short period. All redirected output flowed to a single payment address controlled by the attacker, but the attacker did not mine any blocks and the address received no payment; the lost revenue of the hijacked miners cannot be recovered. Hosting provider CoreX Hosting was the first to notify operators, saying it had discovered unauthorized changes to the mining pool settings of affected machines. One operator said the entire mining operation was affected and suspected the entry point was the miner fleet management software Luxor Commander, but the link has not been confirmed. In the days before Nov. 14, there had already been reports of unauthorized changes to mining pool settings, suggesting the incident may not be isolated. The Bitcoin protocol and consensus rules were not compromised; what failed was the operational software connecting mining companies to their hardware.