Ethereum Classic Labs hires law firm, CipherTrace in bid to investigate source of 51% attacks

The Ethereum Classic blockchain has been the target of attacks in recent days — and now the group behind Ethereum Classic's core development is trying to investigate and bring charges against those behind the attacks.

In a Friday press statement, Ethereum Classic (ETC) Labs announced that it had retained the services of two firms — law firm Kobre & Kim and analytics provider CipherTrace — "to assist in the investigation and pursuit of criminal charges against the perpetrators of the recent attacks on ETC," according to ETC Labs Terry Culver.

"Together we will cooperate with stakeholders and agencies in the United States and wherever else the investigation leads to analyze the transactions and to identify the responsible parties with the knowledge and motive to carry out these attacks," Culver said.

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As previously reported, the ETC chain has been hit with two  51 percent attacks in the past week, in which a single mining entity possesses enough hashing power to attempt to create alternate transaction histories and double-spend tokens. The attacks resulted in the double-spending of millions of dollars in ETC tokens.

Blockchain data firm Bitquery published a report on August 5 that explored the attack that took place between July 31 and August 1, finding that 807,260 ETC — worth more than $5 million — was double spent, at the cost of about $192,000 in bitcoin in order to obtain the hash power needed to carry out the attack. In an August 7 report on the second attack, Bitquery found that those behind it "successfully double-spent 238,306 ETC ($1.68 M) through Bitfinex and another crypto service" after attempting to double-spend a total of 465,444 ETC.