With Litecoin blocks produced every 2.5 minutes on average, a 13-block reorg essentially rewrote around 30 minutes of the network’s transaction history. Eventually, entities mining Litecoin adopted a version of the asset’s blockchain where the bug was never exploited.
Litecoin update:
• A zero-day bug caused a DoS attack that disrupted major mining pools.• Non-updated mining nodes allowed an invalid MWEB transaction allowing them to peg out coins to third party DEX’s• A 13-block reorg reversed those invalid transactions — they will not…
Although the attacker was ultimately stifled, they had taken advantage of what Litecoin's team said was a previously unknown vulnerability that allowed them to “peg out” coins from MWEB. At the same time, the bug allowed the bad actor to disrupt mining pools through a denial-of-service attack.
In a since-deleted X post, Litecoin said that the network’s plumbing “was working throughout the entire process,” and reorgs naturally purge faulty transactions, effectively sending them “through the poop shoot [sic] like they were never there.”
