Medals of Honour

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It is in times of trial and tribulation that one's true mettle shines through, just before Christmas Day 2020, the Blurt blockchain was subject to a vulnerability attack where malicious actors repeatedly executed a transaction that we failed to add to the fee structure, they repeated this over using 32 accounts to post these operations to the Blurt blockchain every 3 seconds and inflating the chain size with over 200 MB of data per day, this even escalated to over 60 operations per 3-second block at the height of the attack.

Witnesses could have performed a Hard Fork to add fees to that transaction but hard forks are dangerous, the chain is the most unstable then and vulnerable to takeover, instead, we decided to took the arduous but safer route of first securing the chain in a VPN and allowing only traffic from trusted nodes.

This attack mitigation was done in uncharted territory, a world-first for a DPoS chain to be wrapped in a VPN, alot of it required testing and refactoring, @jacobgadikian and I spent circa 11 days of our holidays trying to get this right, we, however, were not alone, we had a fantastic witness set that was ready and willing to update their nodes at short notice when new builds were ready and software tweaks were required.

A few individuals went above and beyond the call of duty and we hereby acknowledge, honour and reward them.

@blurthispano - "Scout's Honour"- If it wasn't for Blurthispano, we might not have found out about this anomaly until days later, he was setting up his witness and noticed these strange transactions in the logs and reported them in the witness channel. He also served as an active witness and was very attentive in updating his witness nodes and remaining in daily communication with the team.

Reward: 20 000 Blurt Power

@freakeao - "Scout's Honour" - Also reported the anomaly, he found and reported the comment farming which lead to the discovery of a vote trail and many more accounts with a similar prefix. @freakeao is also the only witness to be running a homebrew setup instead of using cloud services, this is extremely valuable to test as a use case for edge-of-network consensus. Similarly, he was always on deck and responsive to updates.

Reward: 20 000 Blurt Power

@eastmael - "Special Ops" - While the above two witnesses shared the problem in the witness chat, it was @eastmael that reported it to the direct attention of the founders and ensured action was taken. He also coded up a script that helped us identify 1078 related accounts that could be attack vectors, in addition to the ones we had already identified. Like the others he two participated in updating his witness in a timely manner to help mitigate the attack.

Reward: 25 000 Blurt Power

@yehey - "Intelligence" - Co-operated 100% with @jacobgadikian and allowed us root access to his servers to investigate logs that led to greater clarity on the attack and solve the final pieces of the puzzle for the defence. He showed trust and loyalty to the cause with his transparency and willingness to help.

Reward: 25 000 Blurt Power

@saboin - "Sergeant Major" - There is no mistake that @saboin sacrificed an immense amount of time in this endeavour, over and above the call of duty, he was helping out every day in a practice fashion, giving input from his personal experience witb firewalls and sysadmin, he acted as 2IC to Jacob and I without being asked, he was available to help other witnesses who had issues upgrading and was up till all hours of the morning in his timezone, he too sacrificed a great deal of his holidays, and went back to his day job on the Monday following the weekend of the final attack mitigation. If it wasn't for his skills and input the process would have taken much longer and his hands-on-deck approach was a morale booster to all, including the founders. For his uncountable contributions and insight to the attack mitigation, we hereby bestow upon @saboin the highest reward.

Reward: 100 000 Blurt Power

We also thank the community for being patient and for remaining calm and positive, we believe overall this was a team effort and we are back on track due to the resilience and character of the greater members of our community.

In thanks and Sincerity,

Ricardo Ferreira
@megadrive
Blurt Co-Founder