Eclipse Attack

Eclipse Attack is a means of attacking a decentralized network through which the attacker monopolizes all of the victim’s incoming and outgoing connections.

The attacker can then filter the victim’s view of the blockchain, force the victim to waste computing power on obsolete views of the blockchain, or utilize the victim’s computing power for its own malicious purposes.

The attacker aims to isolate the victim from the rest of its peers in the network and hijack all of the connections inside the blockchain. 

In 2015, researchers from Boston University and Hebrew University presented their findings from their experiments in mounting eclipse attacks and possible countermeasures to combat them.