A cyber attack on the Solana cryptocurrency has been made public, targeting thousands of crypto wallets, and that a few hours ago had cost users more than 5 million dollars (With the passing of the hours, the amount will probably be much higher).
The Solana Status Twitter account confirmed the attack, noting that as of Wednesday morning, approximately 7,767 wallets have been affected by the exploit. Elliptic’s estimate is higher: it pointed to 7,936 portfolios. This was within a day, as it was on Tuesday afternoon that users began reporting that their crypto wallets were empty.
After an investigation by developers, ecosystem teams, and security auditors, it appears affected addresses were at one point created, imported, or used in Slope mobile wallet applications. 1/2
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) August 3, 2022
Solana’s sun token, one of the largest cryptocurrencies after bitcoin and ether, fell about 8% in the first two hours after the hack was detected. This problem has not been fixed yet. And it adds to the catastrophe that the cryptocurrency sector has been suffering for some time.
How to buy Bitcoins safely and without risk
The causes are unclear
Elliptic’s chief scientist, Tom Robinson, has said that the cause of the gap is still unclearbut “it appears to be due to a bug in certain crypto wallet software, rather than the Solana blockchain itself.”
In fact, the problem that they are seeing is that the transactions that are being carried out are made with the signature of the owners of these wallets, so it seems that the private access keys have been compromised. A private key is a secure code that grants the owner access to their cryptocurrency holdings.
For now, the solana network recommends users to use hardware wallets, since there is no evidence that these have been intervened by attackers.
The incident comes a day after the hacking of $200 million on the Nomad blockchain. It is the latest crisis that plagues the cryptocurrency market that has not raised its head for months.
Solana’s Lost Promise
The Solana network was considered one of the most promising developments in the cryptocurrency market, with well-known backers promoting it as a rival to Ethereum. Your strengths: faster transaction processing times and increased security, in addition to being an allied cryptocurrency for another market that was on the rise: that of NFTs.
In September 2021 we published information on its impressive growth in Genbeta. In just one month the Solana cryptocurrency had skyrocketed in value by almost 220% to overtake a strong and well-known rival: the Dogecoin.
But lately it has been facing a number of problems, such as downtime and the perception of being more centralized than Ethereum (which has grown in recent hours). A major break in June took the Solana platform out of service for several hours.
Solana was born in the year 2019 and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. The Solana Foundation, an entity, was created to “guide the future of the governance and coordination of the Solana protocol”, in the words of the spokespersons of this Foundation. And soon he found investors who bet on the idea. One of its founders and now CEO is Anatoly Yakovenko who in the past worked at companies like Dropbox and Qualcomm.