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Comment by sna1l | Hacker News Reader

https://etherscan.io/address/0x1dba1131000664b884a1ba2384641... -- white hat group exploited the vuln and are holding people's crypto for them.

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I don't follow Ethereum closely at all, but I don't really understand a few things about this:

- Who's the "white hat group"? Why do people have confidence in it?

- Why does everyone believe they'll give back $75M+? If they decided to just keep it, what could anyone do?

- How will people even be able to claim ownership of the ETH in a way that's verifiable so they know they're giving it back to the right person?

> If you hold a multisig contract that was drained, please be patient. They will be creating another multisig for you that has the same settings as your old multisig but with the vulnerability removed and will return your funds to you there.

It definitely is an uncanny read.

The question makes sense, but really why do people have confidence in any of this, you know what I'm saying?

You don't really have a choice right now. Either trust them and wait to see if your eth is returned, or start rabblerousing for yet another hard fork to undo this 'hack'

It's the same group that rescued funds during The DAO attack so they have a good history of benevolent hacking.

They are just going to deploy new multi-sig contracts with a fix and make the original owners the owners of the new contracts. Pretty easy to do. They are actually paying for the gas to do the fix using donations they received for their work on The DAO attack so the original wallet owners aren't even out the gas the fix would charge (which isn't all that much but it's nice that they are being made completely whole).

Please ELI5. I thought contracts were fixed but they're going to deploy a "new" contract reverting back the owners? Contracts can change at any time?

The exploit allowed anyone to reinitialize a multisig contract with themselves as an owner because the constructor was a public function. These contracts weren't "fixed" like they were supposed to be.

The white hats will deploy a new contract without the faulty constructor with the old owners reinstated. These newly deployed contracts will have all the same information the old ones did but won't be exploitable.

They might have a significant amount of money in ETH themselves and the overall success is beneficial to them? Pure conjecture.

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