According to this research paper: $4 million Ethereum at risk
According to this recent research paper that came out by: Ivica Nikolic, Aashish Kolluri, Ilya Sergey, Prateek Saxena and Aquinas Hobor, there are smart contracts in ether that are vulnerable to hacking due to poor coding that contains bugs.
I'm not sure but if anyone on Steemit has tried programming in Solidity (which is the programming language for Eth smart contracts) but at this point the tooling, testing and validation side is just a hot mess of garbage. So having major bugs in the smart contracts that are being put together by enthusiastic people, like us, is no wonder things are a bit off.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we shouldn't do these, I'm saying the tooling should be a focus for the people behind Solidity and to actually come out with something that's developer friendly and easily testable. This would help tremendously.
What do you think of this? Scary? Have the researches informed the parties involved (the smart contract creators in question)?
Do throw your take into the mix and let me know what kind of thoughts this gives you. I also went ahead and linked the paper itself + the related news to this article.