Ethereum Classic [ETC] Geth security alert: “unnecessary drama” resolved

ETCDEV’s Founder and Technical Lead, Igor Artamonov recently announced an Ethereum Classic security alert. According to him, an unknown person took admin control of Ethereum Classic community organization with Classic Geth and removed all the other admins. The team had recommended all the users not to download Classic Geth until the issue was resolved.

However, within a couple of hours, ETCDEV’s program manager Darcy Reno mentioned that the whole issue was just mistake by Igor. His tweet read:

“There seems to be a mistake here – Igor had added an owner at their request which is correct and fine. That new owner seems to have reverted existing owners to members by some accident or misunderstanding. That user has said that they will revert the change today.”

Classic Geth is an Ethereum Classic repository on Github. The latest version of the project was released 2 weeks back. Geth is the main Ethereum Classic client,  a multipurpose command line tool that runs a full Ethereum Classic node. This is a Go language implementation of Ethereum Classic, supporting the original blockchain and its philosophy of immutability, censorship-resistance, and resilient distributed applications.

During the short investigation period by ETCDEV team, its Director, Anthony Lusardi tweeted:

“We are in contact with GitHub and working to regain control. The user who took ownership has not made any changes to any repositories as of the time of this tweet. However, as the note indicates, please proceed with caution.”

He also mentioned that no changes have been made to any repositories currently. Another ETC developer mentioned on Twitter that “the repositories require approved reviewers prior to PR merge and all build pipelines have been paused until the situation has been resolved. All clients are currently uneffected”.

Later, Anthony Lusardi tweeted:

“All is fine now. Issue and an incredible amount of unnecessary drama is resolved. Hooray!”