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io.net response to the attack: Coin issuance unaffected, second round of reward program will launch as scheduled on May 1st.

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io.net response to the attack: Coin issuance unaffected, second round of reward program will launch as scheduled on May 1st.

The CEO of decentralized AI computing resource platform io.net, Ahmad Shadid, responded to the recent incident of false GPU data on the platform. The issue arose from attackers fabricating a large amount of false GPU information to deceive rewards. The security measures implemented by the team to identify genuine users also led to potential impact on the rewards for the first round of users.

Decentralized GPU rental platform io.net introduces, targeting the AI computing market.

io.net Event Report

Some critics have questioned the actual number of usable GPUs on the platform, which does not seem to align with the official claims. Ahmad Shadid explained in a tweet on the 29th that io.net has been under constant network attacks in the past few days, with users attempting to falsify GPU information to earn rewards. He stated:

Ten days ago, we found approximately 1.8 million virtual GPUs attempting to connect to the io.net network. The team immediately started to identify and block these devices, and it took us several days to distinguish between real and virtual GPUs. io.net has implemented measures including adding firewalls, but this also led to some users needing to restart and update their clients to reconnect to the network, further temporarily reducing the GPU supply on the io.net platform.

Indeed, io.net had emphasized on the 18th that virtual GPUs would be excluded, but malicious actors kept trying new methods, leading to the current incident.

No Impact on io.net Reward Program

Unfortunately, this security update coincided with the first round of the reward program, impacting not only some legitimate users providing GPUs but also preventing non-restarted and updated GPUs from accessing the normal runtime API, causing the connected GPU count to drop significantly from 600,000 to 10,000.

Ahmad Shadid clearly stated that this attack will not affect io.net's development plans. The second round of the reward program will still launch from May 1 to May 30 as scheduled, and IO Cloud v2 and IO tokens will be released on time.