The team at Ethereum are scrambling to resolve an issue in their GETH client.
The issue at hand is once a Geth node attempts to process block 2283416 a memory leak causes the client to crash. Other clients are not affected although the concern is that hash rate has dropped and until miners realize and get up and running on another client they are more vulnerable to attacks.
There are suggestion that the following transaction maybe related to the issue
- 0x5c19695f50a30abbadfeef201d695d9c95c254534019e2f6a7a590e9ef246e82 has the text 'Fahrt nach Hause' which with my limited translation skill is 'drive home'
- 0x7bf56f8f9b98e51fd7d1c76818f6c0607e9738f191afae87edd3a34595803455 this transaction has an empty payload with a high amount of GAS being spent
A security warning has been issued by the Ethereum team as shown below; original available HERE
Security Alert
Affected configurations: Geth
Likelihood: High
Severity: High
Summary: geth nodes running out of memory and crashing on block https://etherchain.org/block/2283416
Details: TBD
Proposed solution: Switch to an alternative client until fix is provided:
Speculation has occurred that this is an attack or at least a deliberate act as a lot of short orders were placed before the offending transaction was broadcast. At this time the damage to the price has been reasonable and only dropped 6.4% at worst which in the land of crypto is an average move for any market.
Other forks maybe affected such as ETC & KR - Developers of EXP have confirmed that this issue does not effected them and they have not upgraded to the offending code base (1.40)