Whether it's pyramid schemes, questionable art NFTs, or outright scams, the blockchain world has never been a more dangerous place. Today, we found out that the Solana blockchain has fallen under attack with thousands of digital wallets drained of their assets.Solana Support reported over 7,000 “drained wallets” yesterday evening thanks to an unknown "exploit." The Twitter account asked all its users to swap their blockchain-backed assets to hardware wallets and to create a new seed phrase as an added security precaution. All affected users were asked to complete a survey so that investigators could narrow down their search.Blockchain auditor OtterSec (via Engadget) noted that the number of wallets drained had grown to 8,000 (with $8 million in funds stolen) just a few hours later and affected multiple platforms and crypto wallets, including Phantom, Slope, Solflare, and TrustWallet. Because the blockchain tracks everything, the attacker’s wallet has been found, but their identity remains a mystery.
Emin Gun Sirer, founder of the Avalanche blockchain and crypto expert, noted that every drained wallet had its transactions "signed properly," meaning the system believed that each transaction was made by the holder of each wallet. He suggested the hack was a “supply chain attack” where the hacker steals each wallet’s private key. Such attacks are very difficult to fix as once the key is in two different hands it becomes almost impossible for the system to determine who is the real owner of any given wallet. Even stopping the blockchain entirely won’t work as the attack would simply resume once the transaction block is removed.
Sirer noted a similar attack affected the IOTA blockchain, and it never fully recovered.
In other crypto news, a project that was attempting to raise funds by introducing a Dune-themed cryptocurrency has halted the fundraising scheme and refunded investors the value of their $pice tokens. The studio which purchased the long-lost story bible for an unproduced Dune movie directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky has instead decided to resell the book sometime next year. Unfortunately, this means there won't be an animated series based on the book, but have to fear. Dune: Part Two is set to arrive in November 2023, so you won't have to wait too long for more Dune.