According to TechFlow, on September 20, Protos reported that the Bitcoin Core development team issued a major security warning, pointing out that a high-risk software vulnerability is affecting 17% of Bitcoin network nodes. The vulnerability exists in all versions before Bitcoin Core 24.0.1, which may cause serious denial of service (DoS) attacks. According to real-time monitoring data from blockchain data analysis platform Bitnodes, about 3,330 of the 19,200 accessible Bitcoin full nodes are affected.

Technical details show that the vulnerability allows an attacker to exhaust the bandwidth or storage resources of the target node by sending a large number of low-difficulty block header chains, causing the node to crash. The Bitcoin Core development team fixed this issue in version 24.0.1 on December 12, 2022 by merging a pull request (PR) numbered 25717. Currently, the latest version of Bitcoin Core software is 27.1, which already includes this fix and other security updates.