What is Spartacus Attack?

A Spartacus attack is a type of Sybil attack that works by stealing the identity of other nodes within a distributed or decentralized network. It does so by exploiting trust and reputation, but does not generate a pseudonymous logical ID. Instead, it simply steals one from a real node, thereby inheriting its trust value. Spartacus attacks usually take place during the network bootstrapping phase, and occur when the Spartacus looks for a bootstrapping node, and later for nodes with high trust scores. The Spartacus pings these nodes. After those nodes appear to be disconnected, it replaces them by copying their ID hashes.