On July 2nd, some wallets had their private keys stolen along with their funds. This is huge news. What happened ? How did the Bittensor team react ? In this article, we are going to answer these questions and explain this hack.
Photo by Markus Spiske
Bittensor
Bittensor is a blockchain project focused on building a permissionless Artificial Intelligence infrastructure with access to a wide array of model learning subnets. It has its own native token named $TAO, which you can stake as a validator or delegate to other validators.
Srouce : TaoStats
The Hack
However, on July 2nd at 7:06 PM UTC, an unknown attacker started draining funds from wallets with compromised private keys. The attack was detected 19 minutes later due to abnormal volume activity caused by the hacker. Finally, at 7:41 PM UTC, the attack was stopped by placing Opentensor validators behind a firewall in safe mode and, most importantly, by halting all transactions on the chain.
This hack was due to a malicious package uploaded to the “PyPi Package Manager version 6.12.2” like a Trojan horse. It contained code designed to steal unencrypted coldkey details. The CEO of Bittensor made a clear statement to help people determine if they were affected by the attack :
Source : Twitter (X)
On July 12th, 10 days after the attack, the chain was back on track !
Source : Twitter (X)
Price Movements
Source : Tradingview
$TAO was already in a very strong downtrend, and this hack made things worse. Many people were panicking and selling, and FUD was clearly present. However, in the last few days, with the chain back to normal and the whole market pushing back up, $TAO is gaining momentum again.
What about you ? What do you think of this hack ?
As always thank you for reading !
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Disclaimer : This is not a financial advice, you need to do your own research !