Protecting our people and utilising code as law.
In today’s announcement we are going to talk about how at Parsl, we take care of our people. Specifically, we are demonstrating this by the implementation of our own arbitration process that will ensure that our investors, users and interested parties can be protected if they are hacked.
The monetary product that Parsl has in the market at the moment is our SEED token, and we are going to talk about what happens when someone who holds SEED token has their account hacked.
Earlier this month, we had a person contact us to let us know that their account had been hacked. We will now discuss what happened, how we dealt with it, and what we’re going to do about it.
The situation started as follows:
- On the 6th March 2019, an individual reached out stating that his EOS account, gu2tqojzgage, had been hacked
- We investigated the account, and upon inspection, we could see that the permissions were changed when the original owner went to claim PEOS tokens.
- Within 4 hours of this happening 1,000 EOS was unstaked from CPU by the new owner.
The original owner was stressed and he reached out to multiple block producers and other projects that he had tokens in, but ultimately, nothing could be done. ECAF (EOS Core Arbitration Forum) was in disarray due to the block producers not wanting to enforce the ECAF rulings and sticking with the Code-is-Law across the EOS blockchain.
Three days later the EOS was transferred by the new owner to the cryptocurrency exchange platform, Changelly.
At this point there wasn’t much we could do, as we don’t have the power to recover a user’s account, but it accelerated an internal conversation at Parsl about our own arbitration system. This is something we were always planning to implement, but we now had a real world use case with which to test our process. We didn’t have a long time to consider what action to take, as the hacker then proceeded to unstake all the account’s SEED token (as well as every other token held by the account), as can be seen below.
With the hacker now going after the other tokens in the account, it was only a matter of time until he or she sold the remaining tokens in the account for EOS to extract all potential value. As the hacker was now signaling intention to act with the SEED tokens, we decided to lock the account’s SEED tokens to ensure this could not happen.
Luckily, we had recently brought on board Stephan Zhang, who was an early supporter of ECAF, and he gave us advice on the process they followed when ECAF needed to act on these matters.
We then communicated with the original owner and requested the following information to confirm he was the original owner of the account:
- Answers for the RewardDrop survey questions from previous months.
- Confirmation of the email address registered with the parslreward.co app
- A transfer of a minimal amount of tokens from the Ethereum address used to register the genesis account
- A drivers license to prove identity
- A live video call to meet the victim and validate the license
Upon receiving the information and having a video conversation with the original owner, ownership on the original account has been verified and we plan to transfer the SEED tokens to a new account provided by the original owner after 60 days. This 60 day buffer has been put in place to allow full transparency on the arbitration process we are undertaking, allowing anyone who believes the owner’s claim to be false to flag their concern.
While we understand this might not sit well with some blockchain purists, we at Parsl have a strong belief that we need to protect our users. We want the Parsl platform protect ALL users from those who aim to cause harm to them. Our mission aims to deploy a blockchain technology platform that is used in the real-world by everyone, not just those who are crypto-savvy, and for that mass-adoption to happen we need to demonstrate that people who put their trust in us, from mums and dads, medicinal patients, grandparents and businesses of all sizes, will be protected, by both the technology and also our processes.
You can watch this video as Dr Isaac Balbin and Simon Beirouti speak about this in detail.
Links
- https://parsl.co
- https://parslseed.io
- https://parslreward.co
- https://t.me/parslio
- https://t.me/seedchat
- https://t.me/parslannouncements
- https://instagram.com/parslco
- https://twitter.com/parslco
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/parsl
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_3QqdnoyY1l3Lf9fpPO8rA
Education
- https://www.parsl.co/s/ParslWhitepaper.pdf
- https://www.parsl.co/s/ParslRewardDrop.pdf
- https://www.parsl.co/s/ParslTokenomics.pdf
- https://www.parsl.co/s/StakingtheSEEDtoken.pdf
The above content is provided for informational and educational purpose only. We make no representation about the accuracy of any of the information contained in this content or linked to in this content. You should conduct your own independent research before relying on anything in this content. Nothing in this content should be considered to constitute any financial, investment or professional advice. Any statements made concerning intentions of or plans of Parsl, including those which are forward-looking are based upon the information we have available at the time of publication and are subject to change without notice. To the greatest extent permitted at law we disclaim any and all liability arising from any person’s reliance upon any of the above content.
