Gavin Andresen - 2012-10-02 18:09:32

As DeathAndTaxes says, there is a weak vulnerability there for clients that are performing initial block download.

It is weak because try-to-fill-up-disk attacks take a long time to pull off, the results are boring (you managed to fill 10 gigabytes of my terabyte hard drive? meh), recovery is pretty easy, and the attacker has to wait around for potential victims to connect to them.

There are a bunch of optimizations to initial block download that could be done; the most obvious is fetching headers for the entire best blockchain starting at the best-block, then 'backfilling' block data in the background.  That would let a new user get up and running very quickly, and would get rid of the vulnerability.