attack would have meant exploiting the way bitcoin transactions are confirmed through mining – the process of generating new units of the cryptocurrency by verifying transactions through complex mathematical puzzles.

"A denial-of-service vulnerability (CVE-2018-17144) exploitable by miners has been discovered in Bitcoin Core versions 0.14.0 up to 0.16.2," an anonymous developer wrote when disclosing the bug on Github."

Source: independent.co.uk