Mt. Gox plans to resume Bitcoin transfers after fixing "phantom" weakness

Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox plans to lift its suspension of external Bitcoin transfers soon after fixing a weakness in its accounting process that left it susceptible to denial-of-service attacks, company representatives said Monday.

As Ars reported last week, the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox was one of at least two Bitcoin exchanges that temporarily suspended withdrawals after coming under attacks that deliberately flooded it with malformed transaction records. The phantom transactions didn't allow attackers to steal money or permanently tamper with the central accounting system for the digital currency, but it had a noticeable effect on some exchanges. The malformed records created discrepancies in the effected exchange's accounting systems that caused them to fall out of sync with the network. The exchanges then experienced slow downs as they recalculated their account balances. The attack and the vulnerability it exploited came to public attention through the research of Bitcoin wallet developer Blockchain.info.