As many already know Ethereum has been under attack again.
This time the attacker (as it seems the same attacker who attacked the DAO) used a simple memory leak attack / Denial of Service (DoS) attack on Ethereum.
Using a corrupted block he managed to bring the Ethereum hash rate down to half of what it used to be.
Included in the crash he sent to the geth ethereum clients was a message which said in german: go home.
This together with the DAO attack shrinks the number of people who can be the attacker to a predictable size.
Assuming the attacker is german and does not use it to point people in the wrong direction I am predicting the this person is directly involved with the DAO team / from the Slock.it group.
"There are only a few people from within the Ethereum team that are able to pull this off" Charles Hopkins
Taking Charles Hopkins comment into consideration people are able to predict who might be involved. The only questionable thing remains on what his or their motivation is.
But one thing is for certain - any attack on the chain helps improving it - there are no other ways to audit the system then to attack it and make the foundation fix bugs and start moving quicker in doing so.
This time it seems they have been quick and good - just a few hours after the geth stopped working they had a fix and the hashrate was back to 4 TH/s which was nearly what it used to be before the clients stopped.
As of writing the ethereum price has risen above the level before it stopped - so it seems this time the hacker hasn't been successful at all. In addition to this we can predict that he this time lost some money on it; last time he said he massively shorted ETH and earned 1000BTC just from shorting.
Due to this - one way to attack the attack is not to panic and make the price rise instead of fall - this will make him loose money instead of gaining form it