The cryptocurrency market has faced an alarming attack that mostly affects Solana and Ethereum users. The attack took place because user funds were stolen directly from their unattended mobile wallets. This reveals that millions of users may be in danger. It also means that Trust and Phantom wallets are new targets for hackers. Business analytics professor Adam Cochran took things from his own perspective.
2 Cryptocurrency wallets hacked
According to the expert, it is possible that the attack was the result of a compromised mobile wallet or poorly stored private keys in certain apps. His initial hypothesis arose because almost no Ethereum users were victims of the attack. Cochran’s thesis was based on the fact that the majority of users who lost their funds were Solana investors or traders. The main reason behind the imbalance is due to the number of mobile wallet users, which is significantly lower compared to the number of mobile Solana users on Ethereum. Interestingly, most of the victims whose crypto funds were stolen were using IOS-based wallet apps.
After publishing his estimates, Cochran received a lot of feedback from victims. Accordingly, users reported that the problem was not only in IOS, but also in Android-based wallets. Solana Labs developers transferred the keys of most Trust Wallet users’ crypto wallets to the Slope Web3 app. The developers confirmed that this could be the source of the contamination. Accordingly, hackers use private keys. It can also get direct access to funds from any other wallet, including Trust or Phantom. Currently, developers continue to look for breaches and other security issues on the network.
8 million dollars stolen
According to reports, hackers stole around $8 million from more than 7500 Solana-based wallets. The list of hacked wallets includes projects like Phantom, Slope, and TrustWallet. This incident made Solana the latest target of crypto hacking. However, Solana’s team has launched a survey of 7,767 affected wallets. He added that his engineers are still investigating the root cause. According to Solana, the exploit affected Slope and Phantom wallets on both mobile and extensions. Then, the team emphasized that users can use hardware wallets. However, he added that users do not need to use seed phrases in the hardware wallet. Empty wallets should be classified as compromised and abandoned.
What happened to the SOL price?
Meanwhile, Solana prices have dropped more than 5% in the last 24 hours. SOL is trading at an average price of $38.49 at the time of writing, as reported by Kriptokoin.com. The 24-hour trading volume of the cryptocurrency increased by 75% to reach $1.91 billion. DeFi expert Foobar reports that the Solana private key has been compromised. Attackers stole both Solana (SOL) and SPL tokens (USDC). He added that this affects wallets that have been inactive for more than 6 months. Both the Phantom and Slope wallets were emptied in the incident.
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