Guess Who’s in Trouble Again? That’s Right, Solana

Due to an exploit in the Slope wallet, which runs on the Solana network, millions of dollars have been drained from user wallets.

Solana is a blockchain platform with support of smart contracts. The company even has its own cryptocurrency SOL.

Despite the fact that our news agency has established itself quite recently, we have already written several times about Solana and some of its problems. Here or here you can read about what Solana has been facing over the last few months. The company has clearly started an unfortunate streak, and apparently this streak has been extremely stretched.

What happened this time? More than 9,000 Solana wallets were attacked. Funds from wallets flowed into the wallets of hackers. The total losses amount to about $4.1 million, according to Solana. Although, independent researchers estimate the amount at $6 million.

The attack affected browser and mobile wallets Phantom and Slope. But later the developers agreed that the Slope wallet took the brunt of the attack.

Slope is a cross–platform wallet for storing cryptocurrency and dealing with it. The wallet supports many dApps running on Solana’s blockchain and it was this wallet, along with the Phantom, that became the vulnerable link for the attack.

Around 11pm UTC on August 2, messages began to appear on Twitter that users’ funds were massively draining to several addresses.

Those users who noticed the leak began to issue warnings to other users to withdraw their funds to cold wallets. Later, Solana in its Reddit account will write four addresses to which the funds have been drained:

Solana claim that the reason for the attack was definitely not a protocol-level vulnerability. According to Solana, the hacker managed to intercept the private keys of some wallets on Slope. But how exactly the hacker was able to intercept the information, the developers of Solana do not know as yet.

“During an investigation by developers, analytics companies, and security auditors, it appears that affected addresses were at one point created, imported, or used in the Slope wallet applications on iOS and Android (created and published by Slope Finance). Private key material from these Slope users was inadvertently transmitted by the Slope app to an application monitoring service, but exactly how the hacker obtained or intercepted this information is still under investigation. No core code related to Solana Labs, the Solana Foundation, or anything related to Solana protocol itself was involved in this attack. This was not a protocol-level vulnerability.”

Now Solana together with Slope Finance are working to thoroughly understand how hackers managed to steal funds. So far, both companies strongly recommend Slope users to create new wallets and transfer all their assets there, since the old wallets are potentially compromised.