Huge Abuse in Giant Altcoin: Wallets Are Emptying!

Ethereum Layer-1 competitor Solana is facing a major exploit on its platform, according to recent reports. According to the details, hackers hijacked the Phantom wallet and stole $6 million. It is stated that there are more than 7,000 altcoin wallets affected. It is also observed that this amount increases every 20 minutes. Here are the details…

Major attack on altcoin project

Solana faced great abuse. It is reported that hackers who seize the assets in the Phantom wallet target a new wallet every 20 minutes. But while the exact numbers are not known, this is a random guess from people familiar with the matter. According to experts, the best thing for users who keep their money in Phantom’s hot wallets may be to send them to an exchange. Apart from that, they can move their coins to a hardware wallet.

In her latest update, Solana said they were monitoring the event. However, there is no evidence of any hardware wallet being compromised. In the official announcement, they used the following statements:

Engineers from multiple ecosystems are investigating empty wallets in Solana with the help of several security firms. There is no evidence that hardware wallets are affected.

Phantom examines: Solana dropped 4 percent

Meanwhile, Phantom, the Solana-based wallet for DeFi and NFTs, is investigating the matter. However, they said the exploit issue doesn’t appear to be specific to the Phantom. Phantom noted in its official announcement:

We are working closely with other teams to get to the root of a reported vulnerability in the Solana ecosystem. At this time, the team does not believe this to be a Phantom-specific issue. We will post an update as soon as we gather more information.

Ava Labs founder made a statement

Over the past year, the Solana Blockchain network has faced multiple exploits. This affected Solana’s reputation to some extent. Following the recent exploit, Solana’s native cryptocurrency SOL has come under pressure. At the time of writing, SOL ranks ninth with a market cap of $13.37 billion. It is also trading at a price of $38.09, down 4.6 percent.

Emin Gün Sirer, founder of Ava Labs, shared his views on the nature of wallet exploits. You can see Sirer’s explanations below:

One possible explanation is a “supply chain attack” in which a JS library was hacked and leaked (stealed) users’ private keys. The affected wallets appear to have been created in the last 9 months. But there are reports that newly created wallets are also affected. Many people have suggested a faulty random number generator. This seems really anachronistic. If it was 10 years ago, maybe. But now we know what not to do during private key generation. So, I would be shocked if the hacker “cracked” the wallet keys due to lack of entropy.