A developer deliberately carried out an attack on a bitcoin test network, creating blocks for 3 years to come

The director of security company Casa, Jameson Lopp, carried out a grifting attack on a bitcoin test network. In such an attack, the attacker intentionally sends out spam transactions.Lopp managed to create 165,000 blocks in a week, which under normal circumstances would have taken 3 years. He spent $1 worth of electricity on this attack.Lopp had previously pointed out a vulnerability in the consensus of the test network that allowed a large number of blocks to be created in a short period of time. He said the attack was a demonstration of how easily this vulnerability can be exploited.“The funny thing is that the scammers who run exchanges and trade test network tokens for real money noticed it almost immediately,” Lopp said.Overall, the attack caused a failure to synchronize nodes in the bitcoin test network.Lopp believes that the incident should be viewed as a “free stress test.”