It seems that hackers have decided to start to target bitcoin related services in earnest as the latest organisation to fall prey is the very popular Slush’s bitcoin mining pool that usually resides at .

Slush’s pool is the oldest mining pool and it started with a forum post on November 28, 2010 when the pool operator (Slush) literally invented pool mining when he suggested that “Join poor CPU miners to one cluster and increase their chance to find a block!”. While the suggestion was quite controversial at the time Slush wrote the first mining pool software (Called a “Cooperative miner” at the time) and the rest is history.

According to Slush he first noticed something was up when someone reset the password to his OVH Manager account at his hosting provider OVH.CO.UK Web Hosting Solutions.

What ensued was a short battle between the perpetrator and Slush resetting passwords in attempts to gain control of the pool. While Slush does not have any evidence yet he says “So far it looks like yet another inside job, like Linode two years ago. Or attackers found some shortcut how to gain access to Manager without confirming the request from the email.”. Slush later goes on to say “For now I fully blame OVH for this issue.”

Slush says he has now successfully managed to isolate and move the Stratum servers ( stratum.bitcoin.cz, stratum2.bitcoin.cz and stratum3.bitcoin.cz) to Amazon EC2 instances so as not to waste any hash power but as there is no safe database server the shares are not currently being recorded and Slush says “Because database isn’t running and shares are not stored, I’ll spread blocks mined during database outage to miners who’ll continue mining on the pool since the database will be up again.”

Slush also says that the mining pool will be back to normal operation soon after he fully migrates from OVH to Amazon EC2.

The first post on BitcoinTalk is available here or quoted below.

The pool has been hacked. Fortunately I noticed it fast enough, so I made database snapshot seconds before attackers overtake the database machine. I lost some amount of bitcoins, but I’ll be able to recover it from my pocket. For now I’m evaluating what’s next to do, because all machines in OVH has been compromised and they cannot be trusted anymore.

Source: mineforeman.com