There are many different things that tend to define human beings, and interestingly enough, one of them is our imperfections. In fact, our imperfections do a lot in orchestrating our growth over time. However, at times, they can also become a bit too much, and that’s why, through the years, we have tried to minimize their impact using one method or the other, with technology headlining all of them for good reasons. Technology gets to stay above the rest because it gave us a set of skills that we didn’t even know were conceivable in the first place. In case this wasn’t enough, the creation also gave us a platform to apply those skills across our entire spectrum, therefore helping us become a tech-driven society. Nevertheless, while the stated transition scaled us up beyond recognition, it couldn’t completely save us from those imperfections. Instead, it just gave them a different look, and as we know, cybersecurity will be an enormous part of that look. The same fact has been proven many times now, and a recent cyberattack should only solidify it even more moving forward.
Solana, an increasingly popular blockchain known for its speedy transactions, has officially confirmed a big-scale cyberattack on its systems. According to certain reports, the breach has already drained funds from over eight thousand wallets on the Solana network. Talk about financial losses, they are, at the moment, estimated to be around $8 million, but with the attack still not under control, this figure is fully expected to go up over the next few days. While there is, so far, no confirmed explanation to what really caused the attack, the conspiracy theorists are hinting at a possible supply chain breach, which gave the threat actors a clear access to the user private keys. Once they got a hold of these private keys, the hackers could have just easily signed, initiated, and approved all transactions on the behalf of their rightful owners.
“We are evaluating the incident impacting Solana wallets and are working closely with other teams in the ecosystem to get to the bottom of this. We will issue an update once we gather more information,” a representative of Phantom, the largest Solana hot wallet. “The team doesn’t believe this is a Phantom-specific issue at this time.”
The final part is particularly on point, as going by the available details, the attack also affected various other hot wallets from the Solana network such as Slope and TrustWallet. This far-reaching impact means that, beyond Solana’s sol tokens, users also lost their USD Coins (USDC) in the theft. For now, in order to deal with the risk, Solana is encouraging users in terms of switching to hardware or cold wallets, considering there is a belief that they were not affected at all during the whole commotion.