Bug Affecting Ethereum Network Leads to Fork

[RSRS]

A bug that affected older versions of the Ethereum network client Geth resulted in nodes splitting from the main network.

According to a tweet from Ethereum Foundation security lead Martin Swende, “A consensus bug hit #ethereum mainnet today, exploiting the consensus-bug that was fixed in Geth v1.10.8.” Sweden added that “Fortunately, most miners were already updated, and the correct chain is also the longest (canon),” In a follow-up tweet, Sweden said that “it was a really close shave.ug impacting over 50% of Ethereum clients leads to fork.” The bug specifically impacted v1.10.1 and earlier versions of Geth clients.

Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden said in his own tweet that “It seems that someone found the bug we fixed in @go_ethereum v1.10.8 and exploited it causing all Geth nodes with earlier versions to split from the network. If you are running v1.10.7 or earlier please update!!!”

The latest version of Geth, V1.10.8 is called “Hades Gamma” and includes a hotfix to the exploit that caused the split. The update was posted earlier in the week by van der Wijden, who said that “All Geth users need to update.”

Many still need to update Geth
According to stats from Ethernodes.org, less than 30% of nodes have made the move to V1.10.8 at the time of writing. More than 35% are still using the previous version containing the bug. This also means that a significant amount of Ethereum nodes are operating with this bug in play.

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