One extra character left inside Zerocoin’s source code caused a bug that an unknown attacker discovered and used to his advantage in the last few weeks, the Zcoin team continued for Bleeping Computer. Out of the 370,000 Zerocoin he stole, the attacker has already sold 350,000. The Zcoin team estimates the attacker made a net profit of 410 Bitcoin (USD 437,000).
Zerocoin, Zcoin or XZC, is a cryptocurrency protocol built on top of Bitcoin that implements Zero-Knowledge proofs to guarantee complete financial privacy and anonymity. Zerocoin is the precursor of Zcash and Monero, two similar cryptocurrencies that provide extra anonymity for their users, much more than the standard Bitcoin currency can provide.
The bug has been discovered on February 16, and the Zcoin team announced the Zerocoin theft the following day, while also announcing a fix for the Zerocoin protocol that was pushed out at the same time, the online publication continued.
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