Hackers can still make use of inflation bug to exploit vulnerable software of approximately 60% of Bitcoin full-nodes.

According to a Bitcoin (BTC) node statistic report on Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr, the integrated software of a total 60,101 bitcoin full-nodes can still easily be compromised by the CVE-2018-17144 bug. The bug was initially discovered around September 2018, which allowed a “remote denial of service (application crash) exploitable by miners via duplicate input”.

At the time of the bug discovery, due to the potentially disastrous effects its birth could bring, the developers have chosen to not publicly announced about it and only disclosed that such bug will weaken the network, making it more prone to Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

Furthermore, the statistics report revealed that the number of bitcoin full-nodes operating at the moment stands at 99,638. The figure has experienced a tenfold increase compared to the stats from most bitcoin analytics platforms. For example, BitNodes and CoinDance respectively reported a total number of 9,515 and 9,391 running at press time.

According to the words of Dashjr cited by the tech-related web page The Next Web, the reason behind such low numbers of operating Bitcoin full-nodes recorded is that, nearly all these crypto exchanges is only counting “listening” nodes, a technical feature that has nothing to do with the criteria to classify the full-nodes, as stated in the report.

Those “listening” nodes may appear easier to be discovered due to its visibility, economic nodes, which execute transactions, can either be listening or not listening.