An unknown attacker that previously disrupted operations on the ethereum blockchain returned today, but so far to limited effect.

In an effort that was reminiscent of attempts last year that succeeded in slowing down activity on network, the owner of an address associated with the wave of spam attacks is sending commands meant to use up 'gas', ethereum's unit of computational power.

However, in what's perhaps a sign of how far developers have progressed in the last year, the attack was quickly spotted by the community.

Péter Szilágyi, a developer who works on the project's Go implementation, noted that a few ethereum developers, including ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin and geth developer Nick Johnson, contributed to "raising the alarm".

Within an hour, the popular implementation released a new version called 'Hat Trick', complete with a security fix that changed the structure of some types of data that were being utilized in the new attack.

As of press time, the attacker had not sent transactions from the account for an hour.

Spam image via Shutterstock