64,000 Bitcoin Miners Redirected to OCEAN Pool; Protocol Unaffected

TREE NEWS reports: About 64,000 Bitcoin mining machines were compromised and roughly 13 EH/s of hashrate redirected to the OCEAN pool starting around 8 p.m. US Central time, OCEAN reported. The pool’s hashrate briefly reached about 50 EH/s and then stabilized near 40 EH/s, while the redirected hashrate later fell to about 100 PH/s as most affected machines were pulled back or went offline. All redirected output went to a single attacker-controlled payment address, but the attacker mined no blocks and received no payment. Bitcoin’s protocol and consensus rules were not compromised; the failure was in operational software linking mining companies to hardware.